a look back at Lebanon’s economic collapse

ARTE – TUESDAY JUNE 18 AT 8:55 P.M. – DOCUMENTARY

With its corrupt politicians and crooked bankers, Lebanon’s economic and financial collapse, which began in 2019, harbors a plot that could inspire a gangster film, were it not such a tragedy for the Lebanese. From the Casino of Lebanon to the Central Bank, from the impoverished villages of Akkar to the buildings destroyed in the explosion at the port of Beirut, on August 4, 2020, the directors of Heist of the century in Lebanon untangle the threads of this plot.

Going back through history, from the country’s independence in 1943 to the events they witnessed as journalists based in Lebanon since 2017, they deliver a documentary that aims to be exhaustive, without forgetting to be educational.

The actors of this hold-up, the political-financial oligarchy which emptied the coffers of the country of Cedar, are confronted with their victims, Lebanese to whom the State no longer has anything to offer, not even electricity nor a decent salary. Dismayed observers of an impasse which has lasted for five years, journalists and whistleblowers, lawyers and former ministers decipher this descent into hell.

Limitless enrichment

It all started well before the civil war (1975-1990), which brought warlords to power. In an opulent Lebanon, this “Switzerland of the Middle East” which has become a tax haven and the prey of wild capitalism, the civil war has exacerbated confessionalism, which undermines the already weak State. Benefiting from an amnesty law, militia leaders became politicians and community leaders, zaims. Six political families have shared power for thirty years with the sole objective of preserving their interests.

“In Lebanon, the country belongs to a mafia”, summarizes journalist Riad Kobeïssi, author of numerous unanswered revelations on corruption cases. Champions of tax evasion, Lebanese politicians maintain incestuous liaisons with banks. Post-war Beirut, led by Prime Minister Rafic Hariri, a Sunni billionaire who made his fortune in construction in Saudi Arabia, and the governor of the Central Bank of Lebanon, Riad Salamé, his former wealth manager, becomes the theater of excess, of limitless enrichment.

“A mechanism was put in place which consisted, as Hariri himself said, of buying civil peace with debt”, explains former minister Charbel Nahas. Everyone has their share of the pie. Lebanon is entering a spiral of over-indebtedness, without investing in productive sectors and infrastructure.

Ponzi scheme

President Jacques Chirac is trying to get his friend Hariri out of this misstep by organizing international conferences in Paris that bring billions of dollars to Lebanon, but Lebanese officials are not making the expected reforms. With the civil war in Syria, from 2011, and the departure of capital from the Gulf, the country is sinking.

Today under investigation in Europe for embezzlement of public funds and money laundering, Riad Salamé is accused of having set up a state-wide Ponzi pyramid, by attracting capital from Lebanese in the diaspora. His financial engineering has only delayed the collapse of the State which, in 2019, has a hole of nearly 70 billion euros to fill. The imposition of a tax on WhatsApp messaging pushes Lebanese youth into the streets in October 2019. The political-financial oligarchy is wavering, but holding firm in the face of “thawrah” (” revolution “).

Four million Lebanese discover, stunned, that the banks have blocked their access to their savings – which will soon no longer be worth anything with the devaluation of the national currency and hyperinflation. Those who have dollars overcome the crisis, the others fall into poverty. Like Sally Hafez, an interior designer, who robbed her own bank, with a fake gun, to get her money to pay for the treatment of her sister, who had a brain tumor.

Clinging to power, Lebanese leaders still refuse to make reforms. With the help of a justice system under orders, they even managed to escape their responsibilities in the explosion at the port of Beirut. To the 220 victims of this criminal negligence are added those of everyday life. “When you inflict on a population what you have inflicted on it, economically and financially, you slowly kill it”laments the former Minister of Justice (2020-2021) Marie-Claude Najm.