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Lebanon Foreign Minister Charbel Wehbi and Swiss ambassador Monika Schmutz Kirgoz held talks over central bank probe with regards to possible money laundering and embezzlement of funds
BEIRUT Lebanon’s foreign minister held talks Monday with the Swiss ambassador to Beirut after Switzerland started a probe into possible money laundering and embezzlement at the Mideast country’s central bank.
Foreign Minister Charbel Wehbi and ambassador Monika Schmutz Kirgoz did not offer comments following their meeting, saying only that the probe is a matter that judicial authorities are dealing with.
Switzerland’s attorney general said last week he has asked Lebanon for cooperation into the probe, without offering further details. It’s not clear what prompted the Swiss investigation. Lebanon is facing its worst economic and financial crisis in its modern history.
English By Dale Gavlak Share on Facebook
AMMAN - The COVID-19 pandemic is inflaming an already severe crisis of inequality across the globe, according to a report released by aid group Oxfam International. Lebanon, now ravaged by economic, political and health crises, must enact drastic reforms in order to survive, economists say.
Lebanon has the third-highest debt-to-gross-domestic-product ratio in the world and is in need of extensive economic restructuring, Nasser Saidi, former minister of economy and trade in Lebanon, recently told the Malcolm H. Kerr Carnegie Middle East Center. If you look at other countries that have been in crisis Greece, Argentina, Iceland this goes well beyond that, he said. We are seeing real GDP declining in 2020 by about 20 percent. It had already declined by 7 percent in 2019. So, this is a massive depression, even greater than that in the 1930s, in the Great Depression.
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File photo of Central Bank Governor Riad Salameh . Salameh’s record is under attack unlike 2008 when he confidently talked up Lebanon’s success. Salameh’s credibility has been on the line after promising so many things and not being able to deliver . He reportedly has consistently favored policies whose outcome has been nothing short of disastrous to the Lebanese people
BEIRUT – Lebanese Central Bank Governor Riad Salameh answered questions from Lebanon’s public prosecutor on Thursday based on a request from Swiss investigators looking into allegations of money laundering and embezzlement linked to the bank.
Salameh said in a statement he had told Public Prosecutor Ghassan Oueidat that he stood “ready to answer any questions” and no financial transfers had been made from central bank accounts.
BEIRUT: Lebanon’s prosecutor general, Judge Ghassan Oueidat, informed the governor of the Banque Du Liban (BDL), Riad Salameh, about a request from the Swiss Office of the Attorney General (OAG) for mutual legal assistance from Lebanese authorities related to an investigation into alleged money laundering and embezzlement tied to the central bank, at a meeting on Thursday.