A couple of weeks ago, Michael Safi went to meet a bank robber. She was about 5ft tall, in her late 20s, and wearing fluffy slippers. Her name is Sali Hafez. At the end of her tether, she took a plastic replica gun and a bottle of petrol and walked into a branch of her bank to demand they gave her the money in her account. She says the balance was over $100,000. They gave her $14,000.
Today we bring you the story of a bank robbery, but not that one. Instead, it is a story of how Lebanon’s banks became so dysfunctional that they had to prevent customers withdrawing their own money. The Reuters journalist Timour Azhari explains how the country’s entire banking system imploded after running what the World Bank has called a giant Ponzi scheme. For years, Lebanon encouraged foreign investment with the promise of high interest rates, but the war in neighbouring Syria and then the pandemic meant that when investors took fright, the whole financial system came tumbling down. And when that happened, it exposed to sunlight what had been happening all along: a carnival of plundering of the state’s assets by a ruling elite that has yet to confront the mess the country is in.
Now, banks are being robbed by their own customers at a rate of at least one a week. But those ‘robbers’, such as Sali Hafez, are finding the state has no appetite – or perhaps capacity – to prosecute them.
