Jul 23, 2016- After days of negotiations, political parties reached a deal to end the deadlock over parliamentary business and let Parliament take up the three bills related to the budget first instead of a no-confidence motion on Friday.
However, the House voted with majority to reject the three bills—Financial Bill, National Debt Recovery Bill and Debt and Guarantee Bill—in a first ever such instance in which subsidiary bills were blocked even after the House endorsing the Appropriation Bill.
Parliament on July 9 had approved the Appropriation Bill.
After Parliament resumed its business on Friday, Minister for Finance Bishnu Poudel tabled the bills, only to be rejected by Parliament, in an official indication that Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli’s government has been reduced to a minority.
Speaking at Parliament, former finance minister Ram Sharan Mahat questioned the rationale for raising huge internal loan in the new budget.
The government has proposed to raise Rs 111 billion internal loan, which is an additional burden on Nepali citizens,” said Mahat. “Before this budget, every person had a loan of around Rs 21,000. Now since the government has planned to raise massive internal loan, an additional Rs 10,000 would be added to each person’s loan.”
Responding to Mahat, Poudel said the proposal on internal loan was realistic. “The projection on the source of budget expenditure is genuine,” said Poudel.
With the budget bills failing to get Parliament approval, leaders of both the Nepali Congress and CPN (Maoist Centre) hinted that the new government would take initiatives to formulate a new budget for the fiscal year 2016-17 which began on July 16 NC leader Prakash Sharan Mahat, while speaking in Parliament, claimed that the new government would revise the bills.
Maoist Centre leader Krishna Bahadur Mahara said since his party had already withdrawn support to the government, there was no reason to pass the three budget related bills.
“Since a no-trust motion has also been filed in Parliament, what a minority government does now does not matter,” said Mahara.
What’s next
Parliament on Friday rejected three budget-related bills, making many wonder what will happen next. Even experts have different opinions. Though the Nepali Congress and the CPN (Maoist Centre) have dropped a hint that a new budget would be brought by the new government, some experts do not seem convinced. Former chief secretary Bimal Koirala said the new government “should not” bring a new budget”. A supplementary budget is a possibility, he said, adding that Friday’s is an unprecedented event, as never before had budget subsidiary bills been rejected after the Appropriation Bill was endorsed. On raising tax, Koirala said as the Appropriation Bill has already been passed, the government has authorised to raise the tax too as passage of the budget means, in principle, the passage of tax policy.
“The Collective Tax Recovery Act 2012 allows the government to raise tax as per the new Finance Bill for a certain period,” said Koirala, who also served as finance secretary before he was appointed chief secretary.
However, former finance secretary Rameshore Khanal posted a tweet saying failure of Finance Bill means “taxes collected from July 16 until the disapproval of the Finance Bill needs to be refunded.” As the Bill on raising Internal Loans and Loan and Guarantee Bill were also defeated by majority, the government will not able to raise extra loans.
0 comments:
Post a Comment