By Elsa Maishman — bbc.com — Banks in Lebanon will close for three days next week after a string of raids by customers demanding access to their frozen savings. A woman armed with a toy gun staged a hold-up at a bank on Wednesday to pay for family medical bills. Several copycat raids around the country have followed, with reports of at least five on Friday. Security forces were deployed to a bank in the capital Beirut as a crowd gathered during one such attempt. Details of the situation at the Blom Bank branch are unclear.
Witnesses told AFP that a shop owner struggling to pay debts had demanded access to his savings, but was thought to be unarmed. He was locked inside the bank with police officers, they said. Lebanon is in a severe economic crisis, with more than 80% of the population struggling to afford food and medicine. Banks have limited withdrawals of dollars since 2019, when the value of the Lebanese pound plummeted and inflation soared. A woman held staff hostage at a bank in Beirut on Wednesday, saying she needed to withdraw savings to pay for her sister’s cancer treatment. She left with $13,000 (£11,000). It is not clear if she was arrested. In one similar event on Friday, a man threatened staff at a bank in Ghaziyeh with a gun, which may have been a toy. He was given $19,000 (£16,500), but turned himself in to police as a crowd gathered outside the bank to support him. As the number of raids snowballed on Friday, Interior Minister Bassam Mawlawi called for an emergency meeting. Banks will close for three days from Monday, the Association of Banks in Lebanon said. The raids have mostly drawn support from the general public, and have been seen as acts of desperation by people who do not have criminal records and are trying to settle bills.
by cbc.ca — ‘What do you want them to do?’
Soubra said he had refused an offer by the bank to take a portion of his $300,000 US savings in the deteriorating local Lebanese currency. “I deposited by money in dollars, I want them back in dollars,” he said. Soubra was cheered on by a large crowd of people gathered outside, including Bassam al-Sheikh Hussein, who carried out the very first holdup in August to get his own deposits from his bank, which dropped charges against him.
“We’re going to keep seeing this happen as long as people have money inside. What do you want them to do? They don’t have another solution,” said Hussein, who got around $30,000 from his savings of $200,000. Lebanon’s banks association announced a three-day closure next week over mounting security concerns and called on the government to pass necessary laws to deal with the crisis. The association a day earlier urged authorities to hold accountable those engaging in “verbal and physical attacks” on banks and said lenders themselves would not be lenient.
Local currency decimated
Authorities have been slow to pass reforms that would grant them access to $3 billion US from the International Monetary Fund to ease the crisis. Lebanon’s parliament on Friday suspended talks on the 2022 budget after a walk-out by lawmakers sent attendance below quorum, further delaying efforts to complete requirements to access IMF funds to help relieve the crisis. The session was described as “chaotic” by one lawmaker who spoke to Reuters. Speaker Nabih Berri scheduled the next session for Sept. 26, following the return of Prime Minister Najib Mikati from trips to London for Queen Elizabeth’s funeral and New York for the United Nations General Assembly.
Among the laws-in-waiting is a capital controls law, still being debated by parliament. In its absence, banks have imposed unilateral limits on most depositors, allowing them to retrieve limited amounts each week in U.S. dollars or Lebanese pounds. Withdrawals in Lebanese pounds are worth less and less, as the lira has lost more than 95 per cent of its value since 2019 and edged toward a new low of around 38,000 to the U.S. dollar this week. Banks say they allow exceptional withdrawals for humanitarian cases including health-care payments but depositors say the banks have not stuck to their word.
In Friday’s first case, a man was able to retrieve a portion of his funds from the Ghazieh branch of Byblos Bank, south of Beirut, before being arrested, the source said, adding that the weapon in his possession was believed to be a toy. Byblos Bank could not immediately be reached for comment.
