BEIRUT: The Parliament’s Joint Committees met Tuesday to discuss the wage hike amid a boycott by March 14 lawmakers who vowed not to vote on the bill unless it was discussed alongside the 2015 budget.
MP Ibrahim Kanaan headed Tuesday’s session despite objections by March 14 figures who pointed out that the Parliament’s by-laws state that the session can only be led by the speaker or his deputy.
Deputy Speaker Farid Makari was abroad, and for unclear reasons Speaker Nabih Berri asked Kanaan to head it. But Berri said the session was a continuation of a previous meeting held on Oct. 13 last year.
On that day, the Parliament failed to agree on the raise and no vote was held. The bill was thus returned to the joint committees for further discussions.
Berri’s move was condemned by March 14 MP Jamal Jarrah, who left the session and held a news conference explaining his bloc’s stance on the matter.
Jarrah announced that March 14 will not vote on a salary scale independent from the budget submitted to Cabinet by Finance Minister Ali Hasan Khalil.
Khalil’s budget included the revenues stated by the ranks and salary scale draft law, Jarrah said.
“This is a good move because it reveals to us and to the Lebanese public opinion the real numbers that will come from the scale,” he added.
Jarrah downplayed the importance of Tuesday’s session, saying it will only bring more complications to the approval of the wage hike.
Explaining that he spoke on behalf of the Future Movement and March 14, he called on the Cabinet to forward Khalil’s budget to Parliament so that it could approve it along with the wage hike.
“We are not linking the wage hike to the budget, the finance ministry already linked them when it included the new revenues in the submitted budget,” Jarrah said.
Separately, Kataeb MP Elie Marouni, also a member of the March 14 bloc, told a local radio station that his party is not willing to attend a legislative session related to the wage hike.
He said the draft bill “has not matured yet,” stressing that his bloc will not support any legislative sessions before the election of a president.
After the end of Tuesday's meeting, Kanaan announced in a news conference that the joint committees will keep meeting until all issues in the wage hike bill are resolved.
Kanaan said linking the bill to the 2015 budget was "irregular" because the Parliament had been responsible for the pay raise for more than two years.
The March 8 Reform and Change bloc MP also downplayed the controversy around the person to head Tuesday's sessions, saying the discussion should not be disrupted by such "peripheral matters."
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