ShareKUWAIT: The cabinet wants amendments to be made to the electricity tariff categories bill that was initially approved by the parliament and will be voted on next Tuesday. According to sources familiar with the cabinet's thinking, the government demands that any changes made to be 'simple' ones. The government believes that excluding citizens in private, investment and commercial residences contradicts with its plans to rationalize and cut expenses because it would only achieve 40 percent of the sought financial reform, the sources noted.
The sources added that the government wants to reduce the number of categories and increase tariffs if consumption exceeds 3,000 kilowatts and not 6,000 kW as MPs suggested. The sources explained that the government intends to strongly back the law, and it might make some concessions in return for passing the economic reform plan that would speed up privatization, impose fees and taxes on companies and reduce the state's administrative structure.
Sports betting
In other news, MP Saud Al-Huraiji warned of the spread of sports-related betting on the results of the local league matches' results, saying that betting contradicts with sharia and defames Kuwait's sports reputation. Accordingly, Huraiji urged the Ministry of Youth Affairs and the Finance Ministry to coordinate joint action to fight the phenomenon, especially since some local clubs, players, trainers and referees were allegedly involved in the betting. Huraiji gave an example of a footballer playing in a club who had never won any championships, saying that he made a deal that his team would lose in return for KD 19,000. To do so, he agreed to commit a silly mistake that cost his team a penalty kick in the final moments of the match so that a fourth goal could be scored, Huraiji added.
New stadium
Separately, MP Ahmed Al-Qudhaibi urged the government to allocate a piece of land in Kazema desert in the north of the country to build an international stadium with a 65,000-seat capacity to be named after His Highness the Amir according to the build-operate-transfer (BOT) system. Turaiji suggested that the stadium should include outdoor tennis courts, basketball, volleyball and handball courts, and an international sports medical center, rehabilitation center, parking spaces and service, recreational and commercial facilities. In other news, Chairman of the parliament's budgets and final statement committee MP Adnan Abdulsamad said that the committee met yesterday and discussed the Public Authority for Youth's (PAY) budget for 2016-2017.
Medical city
The parliament's health affairs committee yesterday met with a team from the Ministry of Health (MoH) to discuss the project of the medical city at Sabah health zone. In this regard, the committee's rapporteur MP Saadoun Hammad Al-Otaibi said that the ministry team briefed the committee about the current number of hospital beds, noting that it was 4,853, and that once the medical city was built and an extra 9,313 beds were added, the total number would rise to 14,166 beds. Hammad added that the ministry plans include building three 300-bed health insurance hospitals in Jahra, Farwaniya and Ahmadi, in addition to five polyclinics in each governorate. In other news, MoH stressed that Sheikh Jaber Hospital, currently under construction in South Surra, would be finished by the fourth quarter of this year. The ministry also denied the presence of any obstacles hindering the project and stressed that construction was going according to schedule and the contract signed between the Ministry of Public Works and the executing contractor.
By A Saleh
