On Thursday, MPs from the Strong Republic bloc (Lebanese Forces) announced that they had submitted a request to Ghassan Oueidate, Public Prosecutor at the Beirut Court of Cassation, to open a judicial inquiry into the contents of the forensic audit report on Banque du Liban, drawn up by the auditing company Alvarez & Marsal.
Georges Adwan, Ghassan Hasbani, Georges Okais, Antoine Habchi and Razi el-Hajj also announced that they had submitted the same request to the National Commission for the Fight against Corruption.
Their move, they stressed, was prompted by their desire to see an investigation launched into a series of financial and procedural infractions mentioned in the report.
Okais went on to say that the reason for this was that they (the MPs) “are the representatives of the people, the main party harmed by all the processes that led to Lebanon’s financial, monetary and economic collapse”.
The Lebanese Forces MPs asked the Public Prosecutor’s Office of the Court of Cassation to “carry out all investigations related to the facts recounted in the report, before distributing them to the relevant jurisdictions, because investigations must not be split up and because of the importance and seriousness of the case”.
After reading the report and commenting on its substance, Judge Oueidate asked the Financial Prosecutor’s Office, the Prosecutor’s Office of the Beirut Court of Appeal and the Special Investigation Commission (CIS) at the BDL to investigate the offences mentioned in the Alvarez & Marsal report.
At the opening of the press conference, Georges Adwan, Chairman of the Parliamentary Committee for Administration and Justice, said that “the Lebanese judicial authorities can no longer ignore this issue”. “Wassim Mansouri (first Vice-Governor, acting head of the BDL) has asked me to inform you that he will respond to all the points mentioned in the Alvarez report, as well as to requests for information on the practices of the Banque du Liban”, he added.
