A criminal audit firm ends its contract with Lebanon due to...

Beirut: The “Alvarez and Marsal” forensic audit firm, on Friday, terminated its contract with the Lebanese side to audit Central bank accountsAfter she was unable to obtain the required documents from him, according to what was reported by the Presidency of the Republic and the Ministry of Finance.

The termination of the contract came despite the announcement by the Minister of Finance in the caretaker government, Ghazi Wazni, on the fifth of this month, to extend the deadline set for the Banque du Liban to deliver all the required data for a period of three months after his failure to do so within the basic period included in the contract.

The account of the Lebanese Presidency on Twitter stated that Wazni informed President of the Republic, Michel Aoun, that he “received a letter from Alvarez and Marsal to terminate the agreement signed with the Ministry of Finance for the forensic accounting audit, because the company did not obtain the information and documents required to start implementing its mission.”

And poses Forensic audit In the accounts of the Banque du Liban, the most prominent items of the economic recovery plan that the government approved months ago to negotiate with the International Monetary Fund. It was also mentioned in the provisions of the road map drawn up by France to help Lebanon get out of the cycle of economic collapse.

The contract was signed in early September, and work under it began on the ninth of the same month. The Banque du Liban was supposed to provide the company with all the documents it requested by the third of this month. Two days later, the deadline was extended by three months. However, Wazni indicated in Friday’s statement that the company is “uncertain” about the possibility of obtaining the documents during the additional period.

The Central Bank confirmed in a statement on the fourth of this month, that it “handed over all the accounts belonging to it .. according to the principles” to my weight. He said that the state could “request a detailed disclosure of its entire accounts and subsequently hand them over to the authorities that it deems appropriate to inform them,” so that the Banque du Liban avoids violating the legally binding confidentiality laws.

The bank, according to what a source told AFP earlier, provided the company with only 42 percent of the required documents.

However, officials at several levels denied this, accusing the Central Bank of obstructing the criminal scrutiny process, which Aoun stressed “its importance in the field of necessary reforms.”

Caretaker Prime Minister Hassan Diab said that “state accounts are not subject to banking secrecy.”

Since assuming the presidency of the government at the beginning of this year, Diab held the governor of the Central Bank of Lebanon, Riad Salameh, responsible for the deterioration of the exchange rate of the lira against the dollar, in parallel with sharp criticism from several political parties of the monetary policies that he adopted over the past years, considering that they accumulated debts. However, Salameh repeatedly defended himself by asserting that the Central Bank “funded the state but did not disburse the money”.

Since last year, Lebanon has been witnessing an economic collapse that coincided with an unprecedented decline in the value of the lira. In March, the state defaulted on paying its foreign debts, and then began negotiations with the International Monetary Fund, which were later suspended pending the unification of the Lebanese negotiators, especially the representatives of the government and the Bank of Lebanon, their estimates of the size of the losses and how to put reforms into effect.

(AFP)