Millions of dollars were wasting annually on state rents

“Al -Akhbar” wrote: The law of non -residential places, which was approved by the Parliament in its last session, restores the discussion again on the exorbitant annual bill that the state pays for the rental of a number of offices, buildings and real estate. A bill of billionaires withdraws the state of the state from the pockets of citizens in order to pay it instead of neglecting the file of government buildings that have been leveled since 1992.

There is no census until now for the number of buildings or offices that the state rented, except for the number mentioned by the Office of the Minister of State for Administrative Development, during the era of Minister Mohamed Fneish, which is 57 buildings. It is basically the work of the Buildings Directorate in the Ministry of Public Works and Transport, which needs a work team, unavailable. It is currently consisting of seven people, which is not sufficient to make field visits and count the number of buildings, except for the survey of their conditions.
In the absence of the exact number, the head of the National Union of Trade Unions and Users, Castro Abdullah, notes that “there are no less than 360 school buildings, about 100 police stationers, a palace of justice and dozens of ministries’ offices and branches of the Lebanese University and others.” As for the worse, it is that the state is rented by millions of dollars, despite its possession of many real estate, with a low price. He states, but not limited to, “The National Social Security Fund, which occupies a firm building in the Bir Hassan area with an old rent, and another in the Al -Raouche area with a modern rent, while owns a property in Al -Bashoor.”
As for the conditions of those buildings and their lease contracts, they are not the best of their conditions, especially those related to their maintenance. According to the sources of the Ministry of Works, the maintenance of these buildings “is subject to its provisions for the provisions of the lease contracts concluded between the state and the owner, as the state undertakes the work of internal maintenance, while leaving that foreign to the owner.” Things remained well, until the financial crisis that turned the reality upside down, as the two parties left the maintenance due to the high exchange rate of the dollar, which made many owners fail to conduct the required maintenance from them. As for the state, it is committed to the minimum duties in the maintenance item “in the context of maintaining public safety and the continuity of work.” Not more than that or less.
Because the state is no longer able to continue to waste public funds, the Council of Ministers formed in a session held in late July a ministerial committee from the ministries concerned with old rents (internal, external, financial, work, defense, and education) to discuss the issue of rents and exit by solutions that exempt the state from wasting millions of dollars annually. In this context, the committee member, Minister of Labor, Mohamed Haider, notes that “the committee has given a period of one or two months to work on preparing a law that includes possible solutions,” noting that the relevant ministries were given the deadline “to count its consequences to give an accurate number to work on the basis of it.
Haider reveals a census of these buildings, but he explains that the number is not accurate and requires some adjustments. According to the discussions that took place during the sessions of the Council of Ministers, it refers to “two trends with the state in relation to old rents, the first trend is that the government buildings occupied today are owned by the state, as the situation in the commercial registry”, and without this trend the cost of the state to study it based on its ability and the price that the owner will offer. As for the other direction, “it is a consultation about a real estate owned by the state in which it can build a gathering that includes several offices or ministries”, but it needs some time and financing, although the cost of any option “remains lighter than the rents that the state pays.”