Thefts Exposed Publicly Without Accountability… Kanaan: “This is how people’s deposits were squandered.”

MP Ibrahim Kanaan, head of the Finance and Budget Committee, stated via his “X” account: “In the Finance and Budget Committee, financial scandals and crimes were exposed, and with actions, not with myths of fraud on people and the construction of government plans that write off billions of deposits, and not with the charlatanism of interviews whose owners were exposed, and not with selling people and depositors positions, and the owners of these positions are eating, drinking, and sleeping, and they are betraying the banks.”

Kanaan added: “In the committee, all financial thefts were exposed and documented in its minutes and books, including the impossible clearance, 9 years before the collapse, and it was found that there were 27 billion dollars whose expenditure was unknown and without supporting documents, and the file is still in the financial judiciary without any accountability.” This means that huge financial corruption cases have been uncovered, but they have not been addressed.

Kanaan pointed out that “we officially demanded the auditing of the Bank of Lebanon’s budgets during the approval of the 2017 budget, and the request is documented in the report of the Finance and Budget Committee, but at that time, all the pillars of power rose up against us and accused us of treason.” It is as if attempts at reform were met with fierce resistance.

Kanaan confirmed that the committee “revealed in numbers and names 32,000 employees and contractors who were distributed by quotas in public administrations, after eight months of parliamentary scrutiny in cooperation with the Central Inspection and the Civil Service Board, but the file also remained in the financial judiciary since 2019 without result.” It seems that patronage is still rampant and that the fight against corruption faces major obstacles.

Kanaan mentioned some legislative achievements, such as the enactment of a law lifting full and comprehensive banking secrecy retroactively, which allowed the judiciary to investigate bank accounts, in addition to laws on illicit enrichment, forensic audit, and the National Anti-Corruption Authority.

At the conclusion of his speech, Kanaan said: “This is how, people, they squandered people’s deposits, and this is how we prevented their write-off, and this is how we imposed the Deposit Recovery Law (financial gap) in June 2022 on the table of the International Monetary Fund, and today it has become the only hope for depositors despite some people’s attempts to divert it from its goal, but we will not let them.” He thus stresses the need to preserve depositors’ rights and continue working to recover their deposits.