All eyes are on Lebanon’s top banker as the country slides deeper into financial peril

All eyes are on Lebanon’s top banker as the country slides deeper into financial peril

If social media and table gossip are anything to go by, the lucky minority of Lebanese not preoccupied with where their next meal is coming from are transfixed by the waning fortunes of Riad Salameh.

The governor of the Banque du Liban since 1993, Salameh’s personal finances are being investigated by several European countries including Germany, France and Switzerland. These probes have fed judicial inquiries inside Lebanon that — although continually obstructed — are shaking free pieces of evidence suggesting the hitherto middle-income country was reduced to penury by recycled warlords, sectarian dynasts, and a mafia of bankers.

Appointed after Lebanon emerged from its 1975-90 civil war, Salameh has been at the centre of this web for three decades. While it was the profligacy and corruption of oligarchs that ultimately bankrupted Lebanon, the central bank governor was responsible for the machines that financed them, and kept them running over the past decade.

As early as 2015, the IMF detected a $4.7bn hole in the BdL’s net reserves. Salameh then started offering Lebanese banks interest rates that would reach double figures to attract dollars BdL would never be able to repay, as Lebanon’s fiscal and external deficits kept widening. The central bank called this