BEIRUT, Oct. 17 (Xinhua) -- The Lebanese Parliament kicked off Tuesday a 3 day session to discuss the 2017 state budget, the first budget to be discussed since 12 years.
At the beginning of the session, the parliament re-elected the current members and heads of parliamentary committees, replacing only MP Elie Aoun with MP Khaled Zahraman on the Youth and Sports Committee, before moving on to discuss the 2017 draft state budget.
Speaker Nabih Berri commended the committee for its hard work at the beginning of the session before Head of Parliament's Finance and Budget Committee Ibrahim Kanaan began the budget-focused talks, explaining that the budget draft law included 76 articles divided into four chapters.
Kanaan said Parliament's Finance and Budget Committee had held 42 sessions between April 25 and Aug. 28 to work on the draft law.
Entering Parliament before the session, Prime Minister Saad Hariri described the session to discuss the budget as an achievement that all Lebanese could expect to see the fruits of.
Hariri and Berri reportedly held a meeting before the session commenced.
Tuesday's session is the first of three successive legislative sessions, which have been slated for Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday in order to elect members of parliamentary committees and begin debating the 2017 draft state budget in a bid to ratify the country's first fiscal plan in 12 years.
Tuesday marks the beginning of Parliament's regular sessions, which will run until Dec. 31. The inauguration of these sessions has ended the extraordinary parliamentary period.
