KUWAIT: Minister of Education and Higher Education Dr Mohammed Al-Fares said that financial experts will be consulted to determine private schools' tuition fees. Fares also denied any intentions to increase those fees and stressed that he asked undersecretary Dr Haitahm Al-Athari and assistant undersecretary for private education Dr Abdul Mohsen Al-Howailah to set the regulations of distributing land plots to be used as schools.

Competitiveness protection

Well-informed sources said that studies on amending the competitiveness protection body law are expected to start within a few days. On another concern, the sources said that the Ministry of Commerce and Industry (MCI) will announce forming a special follow up committee to rephrase all economic decisions and laws related to the ministry's work. The sources added that the committee was founded upon instructions from minister Khaled Al-Roudhan with the aim of facilitating procedures and cut down the time needed for various transactions.

Social aid

Indebted citizens who had unlawfully received social aids will have to pay those aids back, the Ministry of Social Affairs and Labor's Assistant Undersecretary for Social Development Affairs Hassan Kathem said. He added that a special team was formed to do a full inventory of the files at the family care unit in Ashbeliya to calculate the unlawfully paid sums and report them to the financial affairs department to collect them. "The ministry received several requests to drop and write off those debts but they were all rejected because those are not the ministry's funds, they are public funds," he underlined.

KOC budget

Kuwait Oil Company's (KOC) operational budget for the current fiscal year (2017-2018) reached KD 1.592 billion with a KD 50 million increase compared to that of 2016-2017. The parliament's approval of the budgets of Kuwait Petroleum Corporation (KPC) and its subsidiaries is a turning point in the sector's path towards achieving its strategic goals, including reaching the daily production of four million barrels per day by 2020.

New doctors

The Ministry of Health (MOH) urged the Civil Service Commission (CSC) to provide it with 500 vacancies in order to appoint new doctors to operate the new health facilities the ministry intends to open soon. Meanwhile, MOH is expected to deposit the wages of Kuwaiti and expatriate employees working for monthly payments in their bank accounts this week that is by June 15 at most.

By A Saleh