Economic and fiscal laws dominated the legislative agenda of the 2008-2009 parliamentary sessions that drew to a close last week, Gamal Essam El-Din reports The People's Assembly concluded its annual parliamentary session last week, with Speaker Fathi Sorour praising the legislative and supervisory roles it has played during the past seven months. Addressing the assembly on 16 June, Sorour said it had passed 155 laws compared with 148 laws in last year's session. Of these, Sorour added, 137 dealt with economic, financial and budgetary matters. "This means that economic and financial matters dominated the legislative agenda of the People's Assembly in its 2008/2009 session," Sorour said. In comparison, the number of social and political laws stood at just 14. Mustafa El-Said, chairman of the assembly's Economic Affairs Committee, told Al-Ahram Weekly that the global financial crisis was a major factor that caused the economic agenda to dominate the last session. El-Said argued that economic and financial laws focussed on two basic priorities: softening the blow of the global financial meltdown on the Egyptian economy, and moving economic reforms forward at the same time. On the first priority, El-Said said the government moved very early to submit a law designed to increase budgetary spending by LE13.3 billion in the ongoing fiscal year of 2008/2009 that ends 30 June. "In my opinion," said El-Said, "this spending helped a lot in shoring up the economy and businesses against the vagaries of the global credit crunch and stimulated the economy to be able to recover quickly." Going hand in hand with increased spending, the new 2009/2010 budget law was passed last May, with Finance Minister Youssef Boutros Ghali emphasising that its main objectives include improving indispensable public services, offering social bonuses and subsidies to poor and limited-income classes, and keeping annual economic growth at no less than four per cent. The budget law faced a lot of attacks from opposition forces claiming that its main items of expenditure favour the rich. In mitigating the effects of the global financial crisis, the government was also forced to amend a number of economic laws. In February, the assembly approved a presidential decree aimed at lowering custom duties imposed on a list of production inputs and raw materials. El-Said said the amendment was a good step to helping vital businesses and industries better face the global crisis by raising their competitive edge in overseas markets. "While the budget law was mainly aimed to protect the poor, this law was [also] designed to help businessmen and industrialists stand up to the crisis," El-Said stated. In another direction, the assembly gave the thumbs up to a host of economic reform laws. In May, the assembly approved a new law aimed at "regulating supervision of stock markets and non- banking financial tools." In the words of Investment Minister Mahmoud Mohieldin, the law was on the long- term economic legislative reform agenda of the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP). "This 17-article law aims at reinforcing the role of the stock market in an age of globalisation and would be achieved in the form of unifying into one authority the bodies that exercise activities of financial supervision in order to make stock markets more immune to financial shocks and push their contribution to economic growth," Mohieldin explained. In May, the assembly passed two other important economic reform laws. The first was an amendment of Law 93/2000 on deposits and the central registration of financial securities. "The law aims at tightening the supervision of the stock market on central registration of financial securities and upgrading the systems of trading on the stock exchange and the quick and efficient settlement of disputes," Minister Mohieldin said. On the second law, Mohieldin said it aimed at raising the capital of the Central Bank of Egypt (CBE) to LE4 billion. "The increase of CBE capital was necessary to be in harmony with the big increase in its financial operations and the growth of its assets, which now value an estimated LE330 billion," said Mohieldin. The assembly also passed laws on competitive bidding procedures, tax exemptions, and held important discussions on the future of small-scale enterprises and the giant textile industry. El-Said, however, laments that the assembly's session ended short of discussing important legislation on nuclear activities and establishing an umbrella organisation to supervise food safety agencies.
