News / Business

Kuwaiti MPs urge higher expat service fees

Friday, 09 September 2016 5:40 PM [ Last Update: Friday, 09 September 2016 5:40 PM ]

Criticisms are rising in Kuwait against privileges allocated to the expats with MPs calling for increasing the fees of services they receive in the country.

Kuwait’s parliamentarians have called for increasing the fees for the services that the expats receive in the country.

Fees on services such as health, residency, tourist and commercial visas should be reviewed, Kuwait Times has quoted MP Abdullah Al-Turaiji as saying.

Al-Turaiji said such measures should be taken to find alternative revenues to replace low oil income.

He added the increase in charges should not be high, but said it is “urgent” and “necessary” in order to correct the imbalance of the population structure in Kuwait, added the report that was also carried by Arabianbusiness.com.

“It is not logical to have the number of expats threefold that of citizens, and most of them are unskilled and uneducated, which poses a security as well as social and economic concern,” he said, calling for tightened supervision over residency traders who he said caused the defect in the population structure.

Earlier, a new study had named Kuwait as the worst place for expats to live in the world for 2016 – the third consecutive year the country has been given the low rating.

The Expat Insider 2016 survey measured quality of life, ease of settling in, personal finance, working abroad and family life.

It showed that Kuwait had went down in each index this year, most notably in the Working Abroad and Personal Finance indices, from a list of 67 countries.

Qatar and Saudi Arabia were also named in the bottom 10 countries to relocate to.

Bahrain was ranked highest of the Persian Gulf countries for expats at 19th, ahead of Oman (22) and the UAE (40), Arabianbusiness.com reported.

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