[2007-09-07]  Saudi finance minister to be quizzed
The Saudi finance minister will appear before a council that advises the government to discuss inflation, which hit a seven-year high in July, a council member said yesterday.

Inflation rose to 3.83 per cent in July as rents climbed at their fastest pace since at least 2004, and a currency pegged to the weak dollar helped drive up the cost of food imports.

"The price rises are not satisfactory to anybody," Ihsan Bu-Hulaiga, head of the finance committee of the Shura said.

The Saudi cost of living index rose to 105.6 at the end of July, from 101.7 a year earlier. It was biggest increase since 2000 for the index, based on 1999 prices.

"The finance minister will come to the council and one of the issues that will be discussed with him is inflation and inflationary pressures." He declined to say when Finance Minister Ibrahim al-Assaf would appear before the council.

The National Society for Human Rights this week urged the government, the country's biggest employer, to raise wages for lower income workers, saying in a report in Okaz daily that 40pc of Saudis were vulnerable to rising prices of staple goods.

Inflation in Saudi Arabia, the world's largest oil exporter, has rarely been a political issue, unlike in neighbouring Kuwait, which dropped its peg to the dollar in May and adopted a basket of currencies.

The Kuwaiti central bank said the dollar's slide on international markets was making some imports more expensive.

Saudi Arabia's central bank has repeatedly ruled out any change to foreign exchange policy, saying inflation was driven by home-grown factors such as rising ren

Source: BusinessDay