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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. well, well, let me explain this approach, stephen, to the budget and to many of the draft laws that we worked on and passed to the parliament for final approval as we were going into our eight weeks of negotiations with the imf prior to getting to a staff ....
Which, of course, has collapsed and indeed in the viability of the banks. that s why people are going in with guns, holding them up to get their money out while they can before it becomes worthless. and to me, what you re telling me doesn t seem to fix the problem. no, no, no, absolutely. it absolutely doesn t fix the problem, stephen, because the people have been really. . .they lost trust in all the governments that passed in the past at least three years since the crisis really hit hard lebanon, because many of those actions that the imf today is asking for, they should have been taken by previous governments three years ago. so the budget should have been done three years ago. capital control to protect money. people should have been done three years ago. thinking about restructuring the banking sector and working on banking secrecy law to fight corruption again should have been done three years ago. so we are trying ....
In the structure. we are coming to really work on changing that. we worked on passing an anti corruption law very recently. that is why as well we are working on lifting the ban or passing the banking secrecy law, particularly for public service people to be able to open all accounts and do a full forensic audit on the central bank. all right. the president of lebanon has been pushing for. if the governor of the central bank is listening. i dare say he s very interested that such a senior minister is saying that. so that s on the record and that s interesting. quickly, let s move on to another of your key areas of responsibility that is trying to deliver food security for lebanon at a time, again, of catastrophic crisis. you were 70% reliant on ukraine for your wheat supplies. you had the terrible explosion in your port in 2020, which destroyed your major grain silos. you have promised that ....
Capital control to protect money. people should have been done three years ago. thinking about restructuring the banking sector and working on banking secrecy law to fight corruption again should have been done three years ago. so we are trying to fix that now. and again, i go back to the budget. i tell you, this budget is only a starting point because there was no way we could start with a perfect budget and now we are working on budget 2023, which looks totally different, has a totally different approach for next year because we know that the budget that was passed this year needed a lot of refinement. i was not a big fan of it myself as part of the cabinet, but we had to start somewhere. 0k. it s not the best one. we had to start somewhere. we can talk economic policymaking, we can talk budgets, and then we can talk the real lives of ordinary lebanese people. so just going back to these people, and there are dozens ....
Well, well, let me explain this approach, stephen, to the budget and to many of the draft laws that we worked on and passed to the parliament for final approval as we were going into our eight weeks of negotiations with the imf prior to getting to a staff level agreement deal, we literally put on the table about 12 scenarios that really tackled all those issues and most of those draft laws, including the budget, the capital controls law, the banking secrecy law, the banking restructuring law. none of the scenarios we put on the table, stephen, was easy. they were all very difficult, very challenging scenarios. it is true you mention now that the budget was not very realistic as far as the numbers go, but the minister of finance in lebanon himself, in his own words, said that ....