Speaker Nabih Berri is “still clinging to his constitutional and legal viewpoint regarding the officers decree and whoever tries to depict the issue as being targeted against Christians would be mistaken,” MP Ali Bazzi of Berri's Development and Liberation bloc said.
“Speaker Berri does not approach things in this manner and maybe if his opinion had been taken into consideration there would have been more than one solution,” Bazzi told reporters after the Speaker's weekly meeting with lawmakers in Ain el-Tineh.
“There is no political clash, but perhaps there are parties who are offering advices in contravention of the Constitution and the law,” Bazzi added.
Finance Minister Ali Hassan Khalil, who is also Berri's political aide, meanwhile said that had he received the decree to sign it, “there would not have been a constitutional problem.”
Berri and Khalil have insisted that the decree, which grants one-year seniority to a number of officers, should have carried the finance minister's signature along with the signatures of the president and the premier.
“Anything based on something illegal would be illegal,” Khalil added, noting that similar decrees related to the Internal Security Forces had been referred to the finance minister and that “the Finance Ministry's role is not restricted to expenditure but also to the impact of expenditure.”