Electricity Bill Debate Likely to Reach Cabinet in Baabda Session
إقرأ هذا الخبر بالعربية
The cabinet met at Baabda palace at 10:30 am Thursday as Energy Minister Jebran Bassil will ask the government to make its stance clear on a controversial electricity draft law discussed in parliament the day before, As Safir daily said.
Bassil is expected to tell cabinet ministers that they should have a unanimous stance on the bill or else it would fail in its first important test since its formation, the newspaper reported.
On Wednesday, parliament witnessed a heated debate between March 8 and 14 lawmakers over the draft law proposed by Change and Reform bloc leader Michel Aoun to allow the energy ministry to raise a $1.2 billion fund to build plants to produce 700 megawatts of power.
In an attempt to resolve the impasse, the government decided to prepare a detailed draft on the proposal.
The cabinet session would be held ahead of an Iftar banquet thrown by President Michel Suleiman in honor of political and religious figures at Baabda palace.
Suleiman is expected to stress in his speech the importance of national dialogue to consolidate the local situation and preserve it from the repercussions of the regional turmoil.
11 August 2011, 10:25
16
Bassil reasoning is flawed. Politicians pocket a percent of public contracts and Bassil was hoping from this deal to make a small fortune and build an entourage of loyalist and profiteers similar to Assad and Kadafi as Aoun is losing it. He is an economic ignoramus and does not understand that Lebanon’s electricity, transportation and environmental problems can all be solved by public-private partnerships (PPP) if Lebanon is a sovereign country with no arms outside government control and practicing regional neutrality. Transportation can be solved by elevated monorail from Tripoli to Tyr and toll roads financed by PPP. Electricity by building new plants via PPP, reactivating pipelines in Zahrani and Tripoli, and investing in distributive renewable energy and smart grid financed via carbon credit and PPP. Environment by ecotourism. All this is not possible because Hizbollah’s arms that insured Bassil’s cabinet post make PPP and long-term investments impossible due to security risk.
11 August 2011, 19:31
00
Why are we not letting the Private sector build power plants and rund them. The government has shown that it is incapable of running anything other than running it into the ground.
