The end of the second session of the Parliament for this year and the start of its recess have been postponed for a second time.
The second session of parliament this year was scheduled to conclude last Saturday. However, due to important pending work, parliament passed last Wednesday to continue sittings until the upcoming Thursday.
The proposal to extend the sittings of this year's second session until Thursday of next week was passed in today's parliamentary sitting with the votes of 58 members out of the 67 members who participated in the vote.
Nine members voted against postponing the recess. They were all members of the opposition MDP.
After announcing the results of the vote, Speaker of Parliament Abdul Raheem Abdulla stated that the result of this vote demonstrates the extent to which the majority of members stand with the public.
"It shows that they are ready to work 24 hours to serve the public," Abdul Raheem said.
When the decision to delay the recess was made today, the ongoing work in parliament included a bill proposed to amend the law to collect GST from foreign booking platforms and travel agents, and a bill proposed to increase the withholding tax on foreign contractors to 10 percent. Additionally, parliament is also working on a bill proposed to bring amendments to the Foreign Exchange Act.
In today's parliamentary sitting, Minister of Finance Hassan Zareer stated that the measures currently being taken to reduce state expenditure and the changes proposed to the laws will have a positive impact on the state budget.
In response to a question posed by Inguraidhoo Constituency MP and PNC Parliamentary Group Leader Ibrahim Falah, Minister Zareer stated that the state budget deficit can be reduced in two ways.
"One way is reducing state expenditure. The other way is increasing revenue. Therefore, you can see that the efforts to increase revenue are proceeding at a very fast speed, which is to obtain the money due to the state and to increase state revenue in a way that minimizes the impact on the public as much as possible," Zareer said.
The measures to increase state revenue referred to by the minister were the bills proposed to make changes to the tax system.
