By BASSEM MROUE Associated Press -- BEIRUT -- Lebanon’s government approved Thursday the state budget for the current year, with a 17% deficit, the prime minister said. He described the development as a first step in reforms desperately needed in the crisis-hit country. The budget will now be sent to parliament for discussion and once lawmakers approve, it will go into effect. A two-day parliament session on the budget has been scheduled for Feb. 21. For more than two years, Lebanon has been undergoing its worst economic crisis and the newly appointed government has done little to stem the meltdown. Talks with the International Monetary Fund have failed to make progress amid deep disagreements between the government, the central bank and the banking sector. Prime Minister Najib Mikati told reporters after a Cabinet meeting Thursday that the budget projects spending of 47 trillion Lebanese pounds (about $2.24 billion, according to the exchange rate on the parallel market in Lebanon), while revenues stand at 39 trillion pounds ($1.86 billion), with a deficit of about 17%. The government has been meeting almost daily since late January to discuss the budget.

It was not clear what exchange rate will be used as the official rate still stands at 1,500 Lebanese pounds to the dollar while the price on the parallel market has reached more than 21,000 pounds to the dollar. Several other rates are used for bank withdrawals amid harsh informal capital controls that deprived people of access to their savings. Critics say that the government deficit will be covered by printing money. That would lead the Lebanese pound, which has lost more than 90% of its value over the past two years, to lose even more value in the coming months. In what appears to be a move to boost budget figures, the government removed a 5 trillion Lebanese pound loan to the country’s corruption-plagued electricity company from the budget. The electricity sector, where $40 billion were wasted over the past decades, is still widely dysfunctional with power cuts reaching 22 hours a day.

by english.aawsat.com — Lebanon’s Cardinal Patriarch Mar Bechara Rai called on Wednesday for the government to agree a plan with the International …

By Paul Peachey -- thenationalnews.com -- A British-Lebanese businessman is suing two banks who refused to transfer $4.6 million out of Lebanon following the 2019 economic crisis. Vatche Manoukian, 42, repeatedly asked SGBL (Societe Generale de Banque au Liban) and Bank Audi to transfer money to a Swiss account from 2019 but the two lenders refused, citing informal capital controls imposed by the country’s central bank. Mr Manoukian is demanding the return of the $3.4m held in SGBL and the $1.2m held in Bank Audi, plus damages and interest. The banks are contesting the claims. The case comes after a French court ordered another Lebanese bank, Saradar, to pay $2.8m to one of its clients in France last year in the first known international ruling against Lebanese banks over the capital controls.

Mr Manoukian’s claim is a rare case being heard in London, which has been brought under EU consumer legislation that was in place before Brexit. The case has been fast-tracked at the High Court because of the deteriorating financial situation in Lebanon. Lebanon's financial system collapsed in 2019 after years of unsustainable financial policies, and banks imposed tight controls on accounts, including a de facto ban on withdrawals of dollar-denominated deposits and limits on withdrawals in the local currency. These controls were never formalised with legislation and have been challenged in local and international courts by savers who have sought to take out their money promptly in hard currency, rather than in the Lebanese pound, which has lost more than 90 per cent of its value in two years.

By Mark Jenkins -- catholicherald.co.uk -- In 2014 Vladimir Putin recommended three books for his regional governors to read: Justification of the Good, by Vladimir Solovyov; Philosophy of Inequality, by Nicholas Berdyaev; and Ivan Ilyin’s Our Tasks. Although each of these writers had very different visions, they were all united by a belief in “The Russian Idea:” the belief that Russia has a unique, providential, indeed messianic role to play in world affairs. The political philosophy of Ivan Ilyin (1883-1954) is known to have struck a particular chord with Vladimir Putin – to the extent that in 2005 the Russian President ordered that Ilyin’s remains be moved to the Donskoy Monastery in Moscow. During his life, Ilyin had been a fervent Russian Orthodox churchman. Ilyin saw Russia as an organic being, an extra historical, mystical unity, rather than in terms of the kind of legalistic understanding of nationhood that had emerged out of the European Enlightenment. Like Dostoevsky, Ilyin believed in the importance of Russia preserving its tradition of autocracy, as well as avoiding the nineteenth-century western fashion for constitutional government.

In 2014 Vladimir Putin recommended three books for his regional governors to read: Justification of the Good, by Vladimir Solovyov; Philosophy of Inequality, by Nicholas Berdyaev; and Ivan Ilyin’s Our Tasks. Although each of these writers had very different visions, they were all united by a belief in “The Russian Idea:” the belief that Russia has a unique, providential, indeed messianic role to play in world affairs. The political philosophy of Ivan Ilyin (1883-1954) is known to have struck a particular chord with Vladimir Putin – to the extent that in 2005 the Russian President ordered that Ilyin’s remains be moved to the Donskoy Monastery in Moscow. During his life, Ilyin had been a fervent Russian Orthodox churchman. Ilyin saw Russia as an organic being, an extra historical, mystical unity, rather than in terms of the kind of legalistic understanding of nationhood that had emerged out of the European Enlightenment. Like Dostoevsky, Ilyin believed in the importance of Russia preserving its tradition of autocracy, as well as avoiding the nineteenth-century western fashion for constitutional government.