The new insurance law includes the establishment of a national authority for social insurance which is independent from the State Treasury and the Investment Bank, Adviser to the Minister of Finance for insurance and pensions Mohamed Ahmed said, adding that such a step aims to protect pensioners' social and health rights. During a seminar at Cairo University two days ago, Ahmed likened the current Insurance Act to torn clothes that could not be patched up. He stressed that insurance companies did not intervene in the new system, adding: "I will be proud to introduce such a law."
There will be an unemployment insurance system for the first time, Ahmed said, adding that the project gives an insured who suffers from a work injury the right to get compensation during the period in which he can not work. The ministry will refer the new law to the People's Assembly and the Shoura Council [Egypt's lower and upper chambers of Parliament respectively] immediately after the State's Council drafts it constitutionally, he pointed out. The ministry has been preparing the new bill for more than 18 months, has appointed the best graduates of Cairo University's Faculty of Commerce and dispatched them to London to be trained on how to manage the new system, he said. Some attendees, though, criticized the Ministry of Finance's supervision of insurance and pensions. Al-Badri Farghali, President of the Pensioners Federation (still under construction), described the new legal entity as a governmental coffin, adding that this is a new attempt by the Ministry of Finance to deprive pensioners of their rights.
He wondered why the government is trying to establish a new entity and why the Ministry of Finance is intervening in something it has nothing to do with, as it is the Ministry of Social Solidarity that is competent to establish this entity.
This reflects the Ministry of Finance's hatred to pensioners and its conviction that they are a burden on the state budget, as he put it.
