KUWAIT CITY, Jan 11: Informed sources revealed a decrease in the rate of appointments in the Ministry of Electricity, Water and Renewable Energy in the year 2023 compared to those scheduled to be appointed by about 1,612 employees, which is 63 percent compared to the year 2022. They explained that the number of employees appointed in 2023 reached 2,729, compared to 4,341 employees in the year 2022.

The total number of employees in the ministry was 34,511 in the past year, including 33,640 Kuwaitis, which is 97.5 percent, while the number of non-Kuwaitis was 871. The sources attributed the decline in the number of appointees in the ministry to the lack of job vacancies and the large numbers that were appointed in the last three years, which reached approximately 13,000.

Meanwhile, the ministry intends to register 159,000 items (cables, bulbs, water pipes, meters, and other materials in its stores on the Oracle inventory management system in the government finance department. The total financial value of these materials amounts to KD 58.558 million.

Audit
The sources explained that the data for these materials will be recorded on the aforementioned system through a detailed audit of each item separately, following the provisions of control over the mechanism for disbursing and following up these materials, as they are public funds that must be preserved and in implementation of article 1 of the general provisions of Circular No. 10/2016.

The registration of these materials in the ministry’s warehouses was supposed to be registered in 2016 in all the ministry’s warehouses, but the slow documentary cycle and correspondence between the ministry and the Ministry of Finance and a large number of these materials prevented the implementation of this registration procedure.

The implementation of this procedure will remove an important observation from the State Audit Bureau’s observations that are taken to the ministry annually and recorded in the annual performance evaluation report, especially since the current status of these materials means that there is a mismatch between all the materials present in the ministry’s stores and their number in the annual inventory committee report, which prevents tight control over them.

In another development, Kuwait Ports Authority (KPA) has confirmed the issuance of final court rulings obligating companies to pay compensation amounting to more than KD22 million and to put the violating companies on the blacklist; such that they will no longer be allowed to register to operate at Shuwaikh Port and Shuaiba Port, reports Al-Anba daily. In a press statement, the authority revealed this is the result of its serious follow-up on the necessity of confronting all forms of infringement on public funds and preventing the illegal practices of any company, with emphasis on the provision of an attractive environment for investment and improving maritime logistic services in the country.

It also stressed the importance of taking the necessary legal measures to ensure that the State’s capabilities are not violated, removing the violating parties through proper lawsuits, and providing the Legal Advice and Legislation Department with all the evidence and documents necessary to file these lawsuits. It then expressed pride in the Kuwaiti judiciary’s announcement of a ruling obligating one of the companies to pay KD20 million compensation to the authority with the ‘res judicata’ issued by the Court of Cassation; in addition to two companies ordered to pay KD2.7 million -- their registration fees for operating as a container handling contractor in Shuaiba Port from July 2002 to December 2015.

By Mohammed Ghanem
Al-Seyassah/Arab Times Staff and Agencies