Lebanese banker and former minister Marwan Kheireddine. (Credit: Facebook)
BEIRUT — Lebanese banker and former minister Marwan Kheireddine returned to Beirut on Saturday from France, where he had been indicted and placed under judicial supervision in the French investigation into the European assets of Lebanon's central bank chief Riad Salameh, Lebanon's state-run National News Agency reported.
The former minister was received at the Beirut international airport by the head of the Lebanese Democratic Party, former Druze MP and minister Talal Arslan, who is also his brother-in-law, at the head of a delegation of politicians, clerics and supporters.
Kheireddine, who runs the private bank al-Mawarid, was indicted in France at the end of March for criminal conspiracy, in particular with a view to committing embezzlement of public funds by a public official to the detriment of the state of Lebanon, aggravated breach of trust, and active and passive corruption of public officials, according to a source close to the case. At the time of his indictment, Kheireddine was placed under judicial supervision and restricted from leaving France.
The 55-year-old man, who served as a government minister in the early 2010s, had been interrogated by European investigators in Lebanon in January.
Following his interrogation in France a few days ago, Kheireddine requested the lifting of the judicial control against him.
Salameh, 72, is suspected of having been the beneficiary of several allegedly insufficiently regulated accounts in the al-Mawarid bank, in return for various benefits for Kheireddine's establishment.
Salameh is the target of several European and Lebanese investigations into his rich real estate and banking assets in Europe, which were subject to major seizures in March 2022 on suspicion of having been acquired through massive misappropriation of Lebanese public funds. He has not yet been charged in the French investigation into financial wrongdoing, but has been summoned for questioning in France on May 16, according to a Lebanese judicial source and the source close to the case.
On Friday, Reuters reported, based on French court documents, that French prosecutors had informed Salameh that they intended to bring fraud and money laundering charges against him, partly based on allegedly falsified bank statements used to hide his wealth. As part of his response to the allegations against him, Salameh previously sent French prosecutors a 65-page memo provided by Kheireddine.
The document, accessed by Reuters, contains a series of bank statements that, according to one of Salameh lawyers, show how the governor's savings grew from $15 million in 1993 to more than $150 million in 2019 "as he capitalized interest."
But according to court documents viewed, French investigators concluded that the bank statements were false. Salameh "used false bank account statements at Mawarid bank … provided by Marwan Kheireddine, to misleadingly justify the origin of his assets or income," French prosecutors said in the court documents.
Kheireddine's lawyer, Thierry Marembert, said his client has not committed any wrongdoing.
Some of this article is translated from an AFP article published in French in L'Orient-Le Jour
