CAIRO – A group of Egyptian engineers on Saturday called for a swift intervention by Prime Minister Essam Sharaf to set a new date for the election of a new chairman for their troubled syndicate. Members of the ‘Engineers Against Sequestration' group, who staged a street protest, have demanded the Prime Minister's intervention to lift a Government-imposed sequestration over their union and help its members hold a general vote to elect a new chairman. The Group members, who halted traffic movement in Ramses Street, have complained about the deplorable current financial status of the Syndicate and the need for electing a new chairman after more than 15 years of sequestration. They also called for reconciling syndicate members of various opinions and to hold a Syndicate-appointed custodian responsible for the unprecedented levels of financial losses, which the union sustained over the past years. The Group members called for staging the sit-in after a Cairo court repealed a ruling that had prohibited the Engineers Syndicate from holding general elections since 1995. Since January 25, Egypt has seen a number of strikes and protests against low salaries and price rises that have been the one of the most serious challenges to the Sharaf Government. The angry engineers called upon the judicial committee, whose members are in charge of supervising elections at professional syndicates, to set a date for Syndicate elections within three months. The protesters agreed to sort out the lists of Syndicate members who have the right to vote; this process may yield up to 300,000 names. Electoral committees large enough to accommodate those numbers will also be defined, they said. An ad hoc committee has been assigned to follow up on the implementation of the recommendations passed yesterday, the protesters said. The gathered crowd applauded theses recommendations. One of the protesters, Ahmed Abdul-Gawwad of Sharaquia Governorate, said the sequestration had allowed “grave financial and administrative corruption to reach its peak” . "For more than 15 years, engineers were kept in the dark about their syndicate's budget. Services were lacking, and general assemblies were banned. We were not allowed to question those in charge," Abdul Gawaad said.
