Kurosh Salimi

In a closed and unofficial session and as part of its effort to convince Majlis legislatures ‎to give their consent to it to withdraw $3 billion from the state’s reserve funds, the ‎administration of Mahmud Ahmadinejad presented a report to the legislators on the dire ‎future of fuel, power and inflation prospects for the country.‎

According to a legislative reporter from one of the local newspapers, while reporters had ‎been earlier agreed to sit in the Majlis hearings, the government’s disconcerting figures ‎led to a ban for their presence. Koohkan, the spokesperson for the Majlis leadership ‎announced that if the session had been held in public, then the statistics and figures that ‎were presented would have created anxiety among the public.‎

While mentioning the disagreement between the administration and the Majlis over the ‎draught, the reporter from Etemad newspaper wrote that the government eventually ‎decided to send two cabinet minister, that of Jihad and Power, to the Majlis to neutralize ‎some of the criticism of a number of legislators over the draught, damage to farmers and ‎the rise in food products. But since the representatives did not seem convinced of the ‎government’s arguments, they called for the presence of President Ahmadinejad in ‎person to respond to their concerns.‎

According to Sarmaye economic newspaper, at yesterday’s session, government ‎representatives stressed the need to confront the draught and the consequential rise in ‎price, asking the Majlis to support its policies and provide the means to implement the ‎policies of the president and other executive officers.‎

Reporters covering the event also said that the Majlis representatives revealed that the ‎issue of trying to win the hearts of the Majlis representatives by ministers of power and ‎Agriculture to allow the government to withdraw money from the special foreign ‎exchange reserves fund in an effort to deal with the draught and its consequential ‎problems were the reasons why it was decided to move the session away from an open ‎public meeting. The representatives that were involved in the debates believe that the ‎government approached the Majlis deputies to win them over in its policies and thus sent ‎two of its cabinet members as emissaries for the purpose so that the legislators would ‎have no choice and because of the economic conditions support the government’s request ‎to have access to the special foreign exchange reserve funds.‎

Ali Asqari, Majlis representative from the city of Mashhad said this on the subject: “The ‎major discussions were about the future”, adding, “It would have been better if this ‎session had been held in the presence of representatives from the Eight Majlis (to ‎commence work on ???) because 60 percent of the current Majlis deputies would be soon ‎leaving their responsibilities as they did not get reelected.” He concluded his remarks by ‎stressing that the issues raised in the session related to the work that the next Majlis ‎would have to deal with and that the statistics that were presented by the government’s ‎representatives were very distressing.‎