By Hadi Fornaji.
Tunis, 12 March 2017:
A court in Tripoli is reported today to have rejected an appeal by Saddek Elkaber against his dismissal as governor of the Central Bank of Libya in September 2014 by the House of Representatives (HoR). Ordering him to pay costs, it also ruled that all decisions made by him since 2014 were null and void and that he and all those who enacted them out were personally liable for them.
The ruling has been posted on the parallel, eastern CBL’s Facebook page.
According to it, the Tripoli Appeals Court said that the decision had come from a legislative body and that it was not within its jurisdiction to overturn it.
The ruling throws a further spanner in the works for Libya. It threatens to halt all funding for the Presidency Council (PC) and its government of national accord known as the Temporary Financial Arragements, as agreed following a series of meetings between Elkaber and the PC in Tunis, Rome and London last year.
The ruling also clarifies (or alternatively complicates) the controversial one by the Supreme Court in November 2014 which was taken by the HoR’s opponents to mean that it was illegal. This latest ruling accepts the HoR as legal.
The 2014 ruling in fact annulled Paragraph 11 of the Seventh Amendment to the Libyan Constitutional Declaration, passed by Congress on 11 March, 2014, which concerned itself with the HoR’s requirement to decide on the question of whether a temporary state president was to be elected directly or indirectly by the HoR itself.
