Kuwaiti Speaker Marzouq al-Ghanim

National Assembly Speaker Marzouq Al-Ghanim said Sunday the parliament will speed up passing of legislations to address economic imbalances, taking stock of the solutions suggested by international organizations such as the World Bank.
"The World Bank teams developed important studies and analyses on good-governance, fraud and economic diversity and presented to us very useful solutions to tackle these imbalances," Al-Ghanim told reporters after meeting with a delegation from the Bank and in the presence of over 20 MPs.
"The delegation responded positively to a parliamentary proposal to make a presentation on these studies at the parliament in order to allow the Kuwaiti people know about the status quo of the economy in a transparent way," he said.
"The meeting discussed how the Kuwaiti economy can reduce reliance on oil revenues, the high price rates of real estate property, as well as unemployment and overemployment at the public sector.
"We also discussed the cooperation between the parliament and the Bank, and ways to capitalize on the Bank's successful experiences in helping other economies to attain sustainable development," Al-Ghanim disclosed.
The two MPs Yusuf Al-Zalzalah and Faisal Al-Shaye' have been entrusted with looking after coordination with the Bank.
Asked on reports of other agencies about the scale of corruption in Kuwait, Al-Ghanim said many of these reports are based on inaccurate information and disregard the role of the auditing agencies in Kuwait.
"We have told the Word Bank representatives on these observations and we hope that their assessment will be more accurate and practical than those of other agencies," he said, wondering how such agencies could rate the corruption in Kuwait, as country with supervisory bodies, as higher than in countries without such bodies.
Al-Ghanim added that the parliament will continue on Tuesday discussing the reports of the State Audit Bureau (SAB) and the reports of the parliamentary committees.
source: KUNA