Lebanon’s Riad Salameh interrogated, assets frozen as citizens raid banks

BEIRUT — A Lebanese judge on Tuesday questioned Lebanon’s embattled central bank Gov. Riad Salameh in a domestic probe into alleged financial crimes.

At the end of the questioning at the Justice Palace in the capital, Beirut's first investigating Judge Charbel Abou Samra decided to keep Salameh under probe, the official National News Agency said.

Salameh, whose 30-year tenure at the head of the central bank expires at the end of this month, is widely blamed for the country’s 2019 financial collapse. He is the subject of several probes at home and abroad for his alleged role in the embezzlement of public funds, money laundering, forgery, illicit enrichment and tax evasion among other financial crimes.

On Monday, Judge Gabi Shaheen ordered the seizure of Salameh’s assets in Lebanon. “The seizure included luxury real estate and apartments owned by the governor in Beirut, Mount Lebanon and Batroun, in addition to a number of cars,” a judicial official told Agence France-Presse.

The order follows a similar move last year by European countries to seize the assets of Salameh in Europe. In March 2022, France, Germany and Luxembourg seized assets worth 120 million euros ($135 million), following an investigation targeting five people, including Salameh, who are suspected of embezzling $330 million and 5 million euros ($5.44 million) between 2002 and 2021. The French judiciary approved earlier this month requests from the Lebanese government to transfer the frozen assets to the Lebanese state.

In May, Interpol issued a Red Notice against Salameh pursuant to arrest warrants issued by France and Germany. The warrants were delivered to the Lebanese judiciary after the central bank governor failed to appear at a hearing in Paris.

Salameh was once praised as the guarantor of Lebanon’s financial stability and received awards by global financial institutions. Just two months before the economic crisis hit Lebanon, Salameh was awarded in August 2019 a top “A” grade among 94 central bank governors in the world in the 2019 report of Global Finance.

Since the end of the civil war in the 1990s, Salameh has guaranteed the stability of the Lebanese pound. However, after the 2019 crisis erupted, the currency collapsed and lost more than 90% of its value. Meanwhile, commercial banks imposed informal capital controls and locked depositors out of their savings.

As a result, angry depositors have repeatedly held up banks across the country to recover their savings. On Tuesday, a man managed to obtain $7,000 of his $10,000 savings after storming a bank in south Lebanon. Another man stormed a bank in the Chouf area, armed with a hand grenade, in an attempt to recover his $35,000 savings. But after police intervened, he settled for $9,000, the depositor’s brother told the local news outlet L'Orient Today.

On Monday, a man broke into a bank in Mount Lebanon and threatened to set the bank on fire if he did not receive his savings. In a video circulating on social media, the man is seen waving a Molotov cocktail and a box of matches before jumping on the counter and putting bills in a bag. He then left with his entire savings totaling $15,000.

The worsening economic crisis is compounded by a presidential vacuum as politicians failed more than 10 times to elect a head of state since the end of former President Michel Aoun’s term in October 2022.

Meanwhile, regional and international actors that hold sway in the small Mediterranean country are continuing their efforts to break the presidential deadlock and resolve the economic crisis. Representatives from Egypt, France, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United States held a meeting on Lebanon in Doha on Monday. “We discussed several options including taking measures against those who obstruct progress in this area,” said the final communique.

The French Foreign Ministry announced earlier this month that President Emmanuel Macron's new special envoy for Lebanon — Jean-Yves Le Drian — will be heading to Beirut “in the coming weeks,” in the second such visit since last month, as part of France’s ongoing efforts to break the political impasse in the country.