French prosecutors have issued an arrest warrant for Lebanon’s Central Bank Governor Riad Salameh, Arab News reported on 16 May.
The warrant comes after Salameh failed to attend a court hearing in Paris. Prosecutors intended to press preliminary fraud charges, court documents and two sources said.
Salameh has attempted to avoid arrest and has failed to show up for court hearings in his native Lebanon in the past.
In March, the Lebanese Ministry of Justice asked the judiciary to arrest Salameh and his assistant Marianne Majid Howayek, as well as to seize their properties and freeze their bank accounts.
The request came after Salameh was absent from a hearing held on 15 March by a local judge along with European investigators, who were tasked to investigate charges against the central bank governor, including “bribery, forgery, money laundering, illicit enrichment, and tax evasion.”
In March 2020, France, Germany, and Luxembourg seized properties and froze assets belonging to Salameh worth 120 million euros in a major operation linked to money laundering.
The accusations stem from the activities of a brokerage firm Salameh and his brother established, Forry Associates, that took some $330 million in fees for brokering the sale of Lebanese government bonds between 2002 and 2015, $200 million of which was allegedly transferred to Salameh’s personal accounts with various Lebanese banks.
The sale of these government bonds was at the heart of a banking Ponzi scheme established by Salameh that became unsustainable and finally began to collapse in October 2019.
This resulted in a financial crisis that caused the value of the Lebanese lira to crash by some 98 percent, wiping out the life savings of many and causing widespread poverty as prices of everything, including essential goods, skyrocketed. Some estimates of losses for Lebanese bank depositors have amounted to roughly $111 billion.
https://thecradle.co/article-view/24894/france-orders-arrest-of-lebanon-central-bank-chief