JEDDAH, 14 March 2006 — The nomination deadline for membership elections of the sector committees at the Jeddah Chamber of Commerce and Industry (JCCI) has been extended to next week due to poor participation. The JCCI board of directors announced two weeks ago elections for its committees for the first time in order to allow participation and involvement of all groups in developing the sectors. As of yesterday afternoon, 169 JCCI members had nominated themselves for the 38 sector committees; only two of the nominees are women.
The committees represent all sectors in which the chamber is active — pharmaceutical, insurance, real estate, law, construction and different sub-categories of the services and industrial sectors. Each committee should have between five and fifteen members, and the JCCI board of directors has the right to appoint 25 percent of the committee members. Due to the low number of nominations during the past two weeks, the supervising committee has changed the deadline to March 22.
“The committees with the highest number of nominees so far are the Haj and Umrah committee, the lawyers’ committee and the contractors’ committee,” said Mohammed Al-Harbi, general director of the businesses sector at the JCCI and the chairman-designate of the committee supervising the elections. “If a sector committee does not receive any nominees or the number is below the minimum of five, it will either be combined with another related committee or the board of directors will appoint members to it,” Al-Harbi explained. On the other hand, if a committee receives nominees exceeding fifteen, the JCCI members will then vote for fifteen of them. The list of final nominees and the sector committees they are running for will be announced March 25 and the voters will have two weeks to review it before voting.
Among the conditions for running in a sector is that the nominee’s business or practice is in that sector or related to it. Each of the JCCI members can nominate themselves for three different committees as long as their business is involved in each of those sectors; however, a business establishment cannot have more than one of its employees nominated for a single committee. The two women nominees are for the advertisement committee and the real estate committee.
The secretary general of JCCI, Mohammed Al-Sharif, said that the purpose of holding these elections is to pump new blood into the committees and allow greater participation of the chamber’s members to present their views and ways of improving the sector they work in.