The founder of LebTalks, journalist Christiane Gemayel, was summoned on Monday by the Lebanese Cybercrime Bureau “to be heard as part of an investigation following a complaint lodged against her by the association Our Money is Ours,” an NGO that defends the rights of depositors in commercial banks, following the outbreak in 2019 of the financial crisis in Lebanon.
The information was shared this Thursday in the columns of LebTalks. We learned that our colleague, Ms. Gemayel, and other journalists would be accused by this association of “fraud” due to “articles that give details on where depositors’ money went and how to get it back”, as the published article underlines.
Commenting on her hearing, the journalist defended herself by saying, “If we want to draw public attention to the truth about what happened to bank deposits, where they disappeared, and how to get them back, this does not mean that we are ‘hartakjiya’ (troublemakers).”
Refuting all the accusations leveled against her and other fellow journalists, Ms. Gemayel stressed that “we are journalists, and we are competent in this field. We won’t let an association from here or elsewhere hurl insults at us.”
Ms. Gemayel declared that she had “full confidence in the judiciary, which represents the Lebanese, and in the impartiality of its judges.”
