this is not the ideal budget. this is an emergency budget. it s not a budget, really, with a with a major economic vision. it s that word again, it s a fantasy budget. that s a budgetjust to, you know, get the get the government and get the numbers straight. exactly. it s a budget to get the government off the hook. it bears no relation to reality. and you re funded. let s get down to detail. one of your big problems. and i acknowledge you re not the minister of finance, you re the minister of economy and trade. so this isn t directly your responsibility. but you must acknowledge in your role that it is a total catastrophe, that your currency crisis simply gets worse, not better. you ve got at least three different exchange rates. your official rate is, what, 1,500 lebanese pounds to the dollar? the actual street rate is something like 37,000 lebanese pounds to the dollar. nobody in your country believes that your banks are anything other than bust,
as to how we handle the banking issue because we knew every government that passed this one and the one before and the one before, they knew that we should have put a legal framework. i come from a legal background, stephen, and i am against violence. but when the people felt of lebanon that the government did not really manage properly the relationship between the banks, thejudiciary system and the clients of those banks or the lebanese citizens, they were fearful and they are more fearful today than ever before, that whatever is left from their funds might disappear. exactly. ..because they. minister, should those people who have in desperation held up banks trying to get their money out, should they be punished or not? i would say in those emergency times that we re passing by, again,
in a form of draft laws. and the new, the new parliament as well, didn t want to adopt them immediately without doing further research and study into them. that really made us waste about four months. it was really hard luck for lebanon that. forgive me, minister, but even now, i mean, you re kind of implying. well, yeah, we ve had a few problems, but we ve got over them. but you haven t really got over them. your parliament still lacks a workable coalition. it is a hung parliament. they passed a budget, as far as i understand it, in september, but a budget which many independent observers say was completely unrealistic when it comes to spending and revenues, not least because you used an exchange rate for your lebanese pound against the dollar, which was entirely unrealistic given the exchange rate on the black market. so even as of now with the budget that you have, your government isn t facing reality.
on one side of this equation, stephen, is that i agree. we were late. those prior actions that the imf asked for our government to get done or ask for the entire lebanese government to get done, not only the cabinet should have been done about five months ago, but lebanon, as you know, goes through a lot of political turmoil. and we have had elections, parliamentary elections, that really played a big role in delaying all this process at least three to four months, two months prior to the elections and two months post elections, because most of the decisions that our government was taking, including the prior actions that were requested by the imf, none of them were very popular decisions. they were all very difficult decisions. so the previous parliament didn t want to adopt them, even though we put them
people were really tightly controlled in terms of access to their money. he said more than $6 billion was being smuggled out of the country by what he called a dirty money elite. it seems, according to lebanese media reports, that is still going on. there is still one rule for the political elite in your country and something entirely different for the ordinary lebanese people. when are you going to fix that? stephen, i am one of the ministers that came to this government with a mission of change and to fight corruption. i came from many years of living overseas as an international lawyer, and my mission, when i decided to come to lebanon and be in public service was to fight corruption, to fight what you calljust now the political elite that have been holding hostage this country for the past 30 years. and i absolutely agree with the official from the ministry of finance. yes.