President Xanana Gusmao will address the East Timorese Tuesday in a nationally broadcast speech that an aide described Monday as centered on his two-week delay in signing the government's budget.

Declining to give details, a spokesman told Lusa that Gusmao would focus on the issue of the 2002-2003 budget, Dili's first as an independent nation, which was rushed through parliament June 28.

Government sources told Lusa the president might criticize the speed – three months – with which Prime Minister Mari Alkatiri's cabinet drafted document and pressed its approval by the legislature.

Finance Minister Madalena Boavida told Lusa that the government had informed Gusmao of its preoccupation over his delay in signing the budget. She underlined that the government was hobbled in its ability to make payments and that civil service salaries were being delayed.

Gusmao, Boavida added, had communicated his intention to the prime minister to promulgate the budget in order "not to cause more problems for civil servants".

Alkatiri used his broad Fretilin parliamentary majority to limit debate and approve the budget two weeks ago, triggering protests from opposition parties that he was reducing the 88-member legislature to the status of "rubber stamp".

The government has described its first budget, a bit more than euros 85 million, as "realistic", and some 50 percent less than first estimated.