CAIRO - The board of the Bar Association, the nation's largest professional union, has ordered its head Hamdi Khalifa to go on “open-ended, compulsory” leave. “We ordered Khalifa either to go on leave until the completion of his term or call for a new election to be held,” the board said in a statement Thursday. “We have suspended making payments from the Social Welfare Fund. The Bar Association will only pay pensioners and the salaries of the association's staff, in addition to paying the hospitals that we have contracts with syndicate,” added the members. For his part, Khalifa, a member of the formerly ruling party National Democratic Party, described the aforementioned procedures as “illegal”. In addition, Hussein el-Gamal, the Secretary-General of the Bar Association dubbed the incident as “a conspiracy”. “It's an attempt to 'usurp' the Association. No-one can bring down the chairman or the council bureau in such a way,” el-Gamal asserted.
