Judge Ghada Aoun during a search of the premises of the Prosec company. (Credit: NNA)
BEIRUT — Public Prosecutor at the Court of Cassation Ghassan Oueidat filed a lawsuit on Monday against Judge Ghada Aoun, the public prosecutor at the Mount Lebanon Court of Appeal, after she failed to appear for questioning following a lawsuit brought against her by Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri.
Berri and his wife Randa last week filed a lawsuit against the judge after she tweeted an image containing a list of names of several Lebanese officials, claiming they hold multibillion dollar bank accounts in Switzerland that were allegedly frozen by the United States. This tweet, the content of which has not been verified, was quickly deleted.
After the filing of this suit, Judge Oueidat summoned Aoun, who did not appear before him for a scheduled hearing on Monday but instead sent her lawyer.
Litigation
According to the state-run National News Agency, at the end of the hearing, Oueidat referred Judge Aoun to the Plenary Assembly of the Court of Cassation for "inciting sectarian dissension and discord between the components of the nation, defamation and abuse of power." Aoun responded by filing a motion to the dismiss prosecutor Oueidat from the case, as announced by her lawyer to the local TV channel al-Jadeed. According to Aoun's lawyer, Pascale Fahd, the case does not fall within the jurisdiction of the prosecutor, and, moreover, the lawyer said, "there are disputes between Aoun and Oueidat around decisions taken by the latter against her, in other cases."
Later on Monday, Aoun tweeted that "now, the application of the law has become a crime. My crime is that I asked for the application of the law to lift banking secrecy, because I begged and asked for the law to be implemented. Unfortunately, if this is so, you [depositors] will not see your money except in a dream.”
She concluded: “Sorry depositors, you will see your money only in your dreams.”
In her controversial tweet from last week, the judge asked the people on the list of accused holders of frozen Swiss bank accounts to "disclose" their funds in those banks "for the sake of transparency."
"I hope this will pave the way for a law on lifting bank secrecy," she added.
Judge Aoun was previously summoned by the Judicial Inspection in April 2021 after a high-profile search of the headquarters of the company Mecattaf in Aoukar, north of Beirut. She also refused to comply with a decision by the public prosecutor to dismiss her from several financial crime cases. Judge Aoun — who has prosecuted several officials in recent years, including Bank du Liban Governor Riad Salameh and the caretaker Prime Minister Najib Mikati and his brother Taha — is affiliated with Free Patriotic Movement, founded by former President Michel Aoun and headed by his son-in-law, Gebran Bassil.