The meeting was attended by Deputy Prime Minister Saadeh Al-Shami, Finance Minister Youssef Khalil, Energy Minister Walid Fayyad, World Bank Regional Director in the Middle East Saroj Kumar, Bank representative in Lebanon Mona Kouzi, General Manager of Electricité du Liban Kamal Hayek, and advisors to President Mikati MP Nicolas Nahas, Samir Al-Daher and Ziad Mikati.
Following the meeting, Minister Fayyad announced that “we discussed a plan to advance the electricity sector, and adopted parallel paths to advance it, the most important of which is: increasing feeding hours as soon as possible, reducing waste by adopting a plan in cooperation with Electricite du Liban and service distributors, and supporting the security forces and the judiciary to follow up on violators, and we also set numbers to reduce Waste in the plan.”
He added, “The tariff must be improved to cover the bulk of the cost to Electricité du Liban, which will provide citizens with electricity at a cheaper cost, as it will be for about 75% of subscribers at a cost of less than 14 cents per kilowatt hour, and the expected cost of the house will be 60% less than the cost of private generators.”
Regarding the signing of an energy contract with the Jordanian side and the possibility of increasing the hours of feeding, he said, “We are discussing with the World Bank the issue of financing, and the Jordanians and Egyptians must finally be assured that the contract will not be subject to any negative repercussions as a result of Caesar’s Law, and then we can receive Jordanian electricity and Egyptian gas, and it is assumed that This will be done in the next two months before the beginning of spring.”
The Prime Minister chaired a meeting devoted to discussing World Bank projects dedicated to social protection programs with the participation of Deputy Prime Minister Saadeh Al-Shami, Minister of Social Affairs Hector Hajjar, World Bank Regional Director in the Middle East Saroj Kumar, Bank Representative in Lebanon Mona Kouzi, and Advisers to President Mikati Deputy Nicolas Nahas, Samir Al-Daher and Ziad Mikati.
President Mikati received the head of the Byblos Municipalities Union, Fadi Martinos, accompanied by Messrs. Firas Al-Husseini and Tony Azour.
After the meeting, Martinos announced that “we visited the President and presented to him the problems we face with regard to the issue of waste treatment, and he expressed an understanding of the problems we suffer, and we are counting on him to overcome this issue, as we have a problem in paying the company that undertakes waste treatment, and God willing, we will be able to solve this issue.”