Boycott to scuttle key Lebanese Parliament session

A crucial Parliament session to discuss extra-budgetary spending appeared unlikely to go ahead Monday amid a boycott by opposition March 14 MPs and lawmakers from Walid Jumblatt’s bloc. At the heart of the rift, which is threatening more divisions in the legislature, is the issue of government expenditures in the past six years. “The Parliament session is still scheduled for Monday,” a senior political source told The Daily Star Sunday night. “But in light of a March 14 boycott threat and the probable absence of Jumblatt’s MPs, the session is unlikely to go ahead due to lack of quorum.”Meanwhile, efforts to find a solution for the problem of government overspending have intensified, further deepening the political schism between the Hezbollah-led March 8 alliance and the March 14 coalition led by the Future Movement. Chouf MP George Adwan, a Lebanese Forces official, predicted that Parliament would be unable to meet Monday due to a lack of quorum. “We are heading for no Parliament session Monday due to a lack of quorum,” Adwan told MTV Sunday night. “There is an ... important part in the Cabinet that has adopted the same March 14 principles,” he said, clearly referring to Jumblatt’s bloc. President Michel Sleiman met with Free Patriotic Movement leader Michel Aoun and Maronite Patriarch Beshara Rai at Baabda Palace. It was Aoun’s first meeting with Sleiman in months after the FPM leader had launched scathing verbal attacks on the president in recent weeks, accusing him of forging a political alliance against him with Prime Minister Najib Mikati. Details of the meeting were not immediately available. Aoun and his MPs have spearheaded a campaign against March 14 parties, accusing them of stealing public money and demanding records of $11 billion in extra-budgetary spending by former Prime Minister Fouad Siniora’s two Cabinets in 2006-2009. Commenting on the escalating row over extra-budgetary spending, Mikati said on his Twitter account Sunday that what applies to his government’s spending should also be applied to expenditures by previous Cabinets. Public Works Minister Ghazi Aridi, Social Affairs Minister Wael Abu Faour and Minister for the Displaced Alaleddine Terro, who represents Jumblatt’s bloc in the Cabinet, have discussed efforts to reach a solution for extra-budgetary spending in separate meetings with Speaker Nabih Berri and Mikati. Aridi declared that the seven MPs from Jumblatt’s bloc will not attend Monday’s Parliament session unless a solution was found for the problem of $6 billion of extra-budgetary spending by Mikati’s government in 2011 and $11 billion by Siniora’s two Cabinets. “The National Struggle Front’s MPs will not go to Parliament [Monday] if no solution is found for the issue of $11 billion and LL 8.9 trillion [$5.9 billion],” Aridi said Sunday. He stressed that this position did not mean supporting the March 14 parties nor was it aimed at thwarting a quorum for the Parliament session for the benefit of one party at the expense of another. Aridi said the current dispute between the March 8 and March 14 camps over extra-budgetary spending was a political rather than financial dispute. He said Berri was playing an extraordinary and positive role to find a solution for the problem. March 14 MPs have also threatened to boycott Monday’s Parliament session if their draft law to legalize extra-budgetary spending was not discussed alongside a proposal on the same matter forwarded by the Cabinet. The Mikati Cabinet has forwarded to Parliament a draft law to legalize the extra-budgetary expenditure of around $6 billion in 2011. During a Parliament session last month, March 14 MPs rejected the draft law, saying it only partially addresses the problem. They said that the excess $11 billion spent under the Cabinets of Siniora between 2006 and 2009 and $5 billion by Hariri’s Cabinet in 2010 should be legalized as well. But March 8 groups maintain that the Cabinet’s draft law was passed by Parliament’s Finance and Budget Committee because there are records documenting where last year’s extra-budgetary spending went, but no such records of the expenditure between 2006 and 2009.