KUWAIT: A number of state departments received instructions recently to suspend issuing weekly or periodic publications in order to cut down their expenses and rationalize in using the state budgets, said informed sources.

"According to the Finance Ministry, those publications became redundant with the presence of social media," the sources explained, noting that the ministry had submitted a memo in this regard to the Cabinet explaining that those publications cost a lot of money for the printing paper without making any revenues in return - not even from commercial ads.

The Finance Ministry had issued the new instructions to the Ministry of Electricity and Water, Kuwait Airways, Ministry of Awqaf and Islamic Affairs, Kuwait University, Public Authority for Applied Education and Training, and other ministries who have their own publications or magazines, the sources said.

In its memo, the finance ministry also highlighted that the majority of those working in such publications are not Kuwaitis, which goes against government plans to replace expatriate workers with citizens. Further, the sources said that the Finance Ministry urged government bodies to change the topics published in those publications into electronic ones to be posted on each ministry's official social media accounts.

Housing units

In other news, Director of the Public Authority for Housing Welfare Bader Al-Weqayyan announced the authority's readiness to hand over housing units at the South Abdullah Al-Mubarak project. Weqayyan added that the second contract at the Metlaa project belongs to the Chinese government and that a meeting was held at the authority's headquarters and attended by the Chinese ambassador to Kuwait to have the company's CEO sign an affidavit to stick to the first phase's schedule by the end of February 2020. The second phase, which includes 6,342 units, would be finished by the end of June 2020, he noted.

Attestation fees

Responding to social media reports about collecting KD 2 from citizens to attest sick leaves, the Ministry of Health released a statement yesterday in which it explained that the attestation department only attests sick leaves issued by private clinics with a KD 2 fee in the form of a revenue stamp.

By A Saleh