Yesterday's session of the People's Assembly was marked by a verbal altercation between Finance Minister Youssef Boutros Ghali and the chairman of the Central Audit Bureau (CAB), Gawdat el-Malt, who considered Ghali's words as slander.
The fight broke out while Dr. Ghali was replying to El-Malt's statement on Sunday. He described El-Malat as the World Bank representative, in a reference to what the chairman said based on the World Bank report about the government's failure to improve the investment climate.
El-Malat considered these words as slander and angrily said: "I neither represent the World Bank nor the Egyptian opposition, but a neutral authority charged with helping the People's Assembly in its constitutional task, namely controlling the executive authority."
He then demanded that Ghali's words be erased from the procès-verbal and asked for an apology.
Speaker Fathi Sorour asked for the procès-verbal and also asked Ghali what he meant. The minister's answer was unclear, and Sorour repeated the same question.
Ghali said that he was not referring to the CAB chairman and that he respected this authority and its workers.
Sorour asked for the minister's words to be removed amid a storm of protests from Opposition MPs, who pointed out that the Minister did not apologize.
Sorour asked them to be quiet, while Malt told them that he could defend himself.
The Finance Minister then resumed his speech saying: "The flow of some investments from inside to outside Egypt is in line with the philosophy of economic openness adopted by the National Democratic Party and President Mubarak." He also described some remarks of CAB as pure jargon.
El-Malt then asked not to involve the President, as he was innocent of the mistakes of the government, which only saw the world as "rosy", as the chairman put it.
He then wondered: "Does the government know anything about corruption in municipalities? Does it know that traders do not supply the market to raise prices?"
The vice-chairman of the Muslim Brotherhood block, Hussein Ibrahim, demanded that the minister be tried on charges of assaulting the CAB chairman inside the Assembly.
Sorour, however, answered: "Whoever mentions this issue one more time is ill-intentioned."
The session ended with 45 MPs asking the Speaker to send the CAO report to the public prosecutor so that he could investigate into the accusations that it contains.
