Bravo Minister Fahd Al-Shariaan
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Since the beginning of Kuwait’s independence, cooperative societies were established in various residential areas to provide goods and services to the people of the region.
Despite the almost prevailing belief that such cooperatives provided a social and economic benefit to the society since their first establishment in 1962, they were also the cause of the spread of corruption in society.
Its womb gave birth to some of the most destructive politicians and the boards of directors of some of them were the source of corruption in the entire state.
We have also known big thieves who stole the cooperatives they were entrusted with, influenced those behind them, and benefited their relatives and companies. The majority of them also had a role in strengthening political Islam, supporting its Sunni and Shiite parties, and supporting their candidates financially and morally, in addition to their negative impact on the demographics.
Financial and administrative corruption mostly contributed to the deterioration of the service and the rise in the prices of many goods and services, and this benefited the wholesale markets and supermarkets, whose sales are increasing year after year, at the expense of cooperatives and their businesses are steadily flourishing, despite the fact that none of them enjoys the huge advantages that the cooperatives enjoy from free large buildings, land for free, and vast car parks, yet the majority of them achieve only a small amount of profits and some have declared bankruptcy.
If the Minister of Affairs, who recently showed clear distinction in confronting the corruption and destruction of many cooperatives, had met a delegation of major suppliers to the cooperatives, he would have heard from them a lot of what they are subjected to in terms of abuse and extortion, and the cheap means they resort to milk the traders and force them to hire shelves, offer free goods, requesting bribes before accepting their goods, and other daily hardships and sufferings.
The trader cares for his business and seeks achieving profits, he usually adds the cost of each corruption to his goods or services he provides, so the prices rise unreasonably, and the reason is not the trader, in most cases, but the corruption in these cooperatives.
It seems that, in the new reformist era, we are about to enter a stage of serious sifting out of the ruinous situation in these cooperatives which were established to serve the citizen, and they became the opposite.
Almost no cooperative witnessed one or more financial scandals, and the ministry of Social Affairs had no option other than the dissolution of the boards of directors of the corrupt cooperatives and the appointment of interim boards, so that corruption would continue with them, and preparations for the elections of a new board of directors, so that the new board, in turn, would fall into the clutches of corruption and the reason was due to the elements of corruption in the core of the cooperatives.
We wish the chivalrous Minister, Fahd Al-Shariaan, to continue his reforms, to save the shareholders of dozens of cooperative societies from the evils of their boards of directors, and to intensify the penalties for the corrupt among them.
e-mail: [email protected]
By Ahmad alsarraf
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