Cabinet Wants to Reduce 1200 Billion LBP from Budget

The Cabinet held another meeting on Thursday to discuss the 2019 state budget and it was chaired by Prime Minister Saad Hariri at the Grand Serail.

At the end of the meeting, the Minister of Information Jamal Jarrah said:

“Today’s meeting lasted five hours, during which the budget items and required procedures to reduce current and operating expenses were discussed. The expenditures were discussed and the reduction rate for each article was defined so we can reduce between 1000 to 1200 billion Lebanese pounds from the 2019 budget.

This took around two hours. After that, each minister will study these reductions in his ministry. Starting tomorrow, we will discuss the articles of the ministries according to the directives set today regarding the reduction, so that we can reach the desired reduction. This way we will be able to reduce the budget deficit between 7 and 8 percent.

This took a while because we went into the details of each article. Tomorrow, the Council of Ministers will meet at one-thirty to pursue the discussion”.

Asked if tomorrow’s session will be the last one, Jarrah said that it will not and there might be meetings on Saturday and Sunday.

Asked if the twenty percent reduction is an addition to the twenty percent reduced last year, Jarrah said: “It’s true, but the percentage is not 20%. This means it is of 8 or 6 or 2% for some articles and more for others. But we took the directives based on a study prepared by the Presidency of the Council of Ministers to see the reductions that would lead to a cutback of 1200 billion Lebanese pounds”.

Asked if the 15% reduction in salaries is the last solution, Jarrah said that the issue of salaries was put aside to see what could be done in the other articles. There are new proposals by the ministers that can increase the income and reduce the expenditures, all of which are being studied. Tomorrow the ministers will give suggestions and practical ways to reduce the budgets of their ministries.