Member of parliament’s economic committee Amr El-Gohary has demanded not approving the draft Consumer Protection Law before settling arguments over it.
El-Gohary said that this demand is in the best interest of consumers and will prevent the overlapping of specialities of the different regulatory powers in the process of market control.
El-Gohary added that parliament is still waiting for the minister of trade and industry to send the controls and work mechanisms of the service and maintenance centres. Additionally, he noted that a traffic law has not been issued by the government up until now.
El-Gohary pointed out that there is a new legal article in the draft law that is inconsistent with the Consumer Protection Law and prevention of monopolistic practices. Article 8 stipulates that strategic products ready for sale must not be prohibited from being sold, whether through hiding them, not offering them for sale, or refraining from selling them in any other form.
After asking for the opinion of the Consumer Protection Agency (CPA), a decision should be made by the prime minister to determine strategic products and their trade for a specific period of time, as well as determine the specialised bodies in this regard. The decision will then be published in two widely-circulated daily newspapers.
El-Gohary believes that this article has not explained the consequence of its violation, which leaves room for overlapping and conflicting with other laws.
According to this article, any entity that holds strategic goods must notify the concerned specialised body of the stored goods they posses, as well as their amount.
He said that there many articles’ discussion was postponed, such as Article 36 regarding the services exempted from the rules of this law.
Exemptions include banking and financial services, as well as services of trading in the capital market, ready-made food delivery, home groceries, and newspaper subscriptions.
Representative of the economic committee, Medhat El-Sherif, said that he objects to allocating 10% of the resources of the CPA to funding consumer protection associations.
“I will be objecting to this because it opens doors to corruption. Moreover, these associations are subject to the Civil Organisations Law. The criticism about the CPA obtaining 25% of the proceeds of reconciliations of fines does not make sense,” El-Sherif said.
He added that the agency needs financial resources to expand its branches and increase the number of its employees.
