Algeria: Senators advocate further taxes on alcohol and tobacco and lash at mismanaged austerity measures

Members of the Council of the Nation or Senate have renewed their demand for the need for the government to give up its all-time imposed logic, by being forced to discuss the budget settlement laws retroactively, ie three milestone years of financial laws, and also called into question the austerity measures announced by the government at a time of an absence of monitoring of public money mechanisms.

Most of the senators’ interventions focused mostly on the untoward current financial situation of the country , rather than dwelling on in the numbers included in the settlement of the budget law for the year 2013, well ahead  the scathing collapse of oil prices.

In his speech, Senator, Abdelwahab Benzaim, enumerated a number of suggestions that he  felt must be included in the Finance Act of 2017, alluding for instance to the imposition by the government of additional taxes on tobacco and alcohol manufacturers or importers, and the delivery of the status of property contracts for more than a million Algerians, and therefore take advantage of the billions that will stem from this remedial decisions.

For his part, a senator belonging to the FFS Party, Moussa Tmadar Taza,  stressed that no government minister had accepted to face the MPs after the monitoring of accounting imbalances in their respective sectors, and in the view of this Senator, these ministers do not recognize the authority of parliament as a legislative body which has the right to exercise parliamentary control over the government’s policies, as he put it.

He further questioned the feasibility of the government’s desire to discuss some “defunct’ laws which have elapsed for three years now, at a time when all the financial data have totally changed.