Lebanese major retailers to shut down amid economic crisis

Lebanese major retailers to shut down amid economic crisis

BEIRUT (AP) “” Major retailers in Lebanon announced on Thursday they will temporarily shut down in the face of an increasingly volatile currency market and their inability to set prices while the Lebanese pound plunges against the dollar.

Later in the day, owners of the businesses rallied in central Beirut to denounce the government's inability to handle a deepening economic and financial crisis, and urging others to join them.

"The company is losing and [“¦ the customers] think we are robbing them,“ Samir Saliba, owner of sportswear retailer Mike Sport, told The Associated Press. "We want a clear economic policy to know how to move forward and not buy our dollars from the black market and be humiliated with the brokers and money changers.“

The protesters called on the government to resign and urged other stores to join their protest shutdown. Some marched toward the government offices where they scuffled with policemen as the demonstrators tried to remove concrete blocks in place for months to isolate the area from what used to be a protest camp in an earlier wave of anti-government demonstrations.

The Lebanese pound recorded a new low Thursday, selling at nearly 10,000 for a dollar and maintaining the downward slide that