The leader of the CPL, Gebran Bassil, surrounded by two senior party officials. Photo Tayyar.org / Facebook
The leader of the Free Patriotic Movement (FPM), Gebran Bassil, reacted sharply Thursday evening to the decision of Lebanon's Court of Audit regarding a case related to the management of the Ministry of Telecommunications, in which the FPM MP Nicolas Sehnaoui was ordered to pay compensatory damages. He denounced what he called "judicial oppression" targeting the FPM and "police methods."
The Court of Audit at the beginning of the week ordered four former telecommunications ministers, including Nicolas Sehnaoui, former FPM vice president, to pay more than $35 million in compensatory damages for a series of costly real estate decisions affecting public funds via the public mobile operator MIC 2 (Touch).
In addition to Sehnaoui, the court imposed these penalties on Jamal Jarrah, Mohammad Choucair and Johnny Corm.
The Riad Salameh case
"The FPM is currently experiencing a period of judicial oppression," said Bassil. "They are turning Beirut ... into a city where judgments and police methods are practiced: they go after honest people, whitewash offenders, and focus all their efforts on freeing Riad Salameh, who stole the money of the Lebanese, then accuse us," the FPM MP blasted.
Riad Salameh, former governor of the central bank, was released on record bail by the judiciary in early September, nearly a year after his arrest in the so-called Optimum Invest case, in which he is suspected of having received millions of dollars in commissions while running the central bank.
A nemesis of the FPM and former president Michel Aoun, Salameh spoke on TV Thursday night for the first time since his release, in a lengthy interview in which he insisted he had been the victim of "demonization" as part of a "plot" to "destroy the Lebanese banking and financial system."
A 'politicized' justice
Bassil also lamented the "state of law and legality in Lebanon." The FPM leader's comments were made Thursday during the annual Beirut dinner, attended by party founder Michel Aoun, MPs Nicolas Sehnaoui and Edgard Traboulsi, former MP Antoine Pano, and a broad audience of supporters.
Sehnaoui, who served between 2011 and 2014, is required to pay $8.07 million for his role in the Kassabian building affair. According to the Court of Audit, he signed the lease contract without a public tender, despite warnings and technical reports describing the building as being in poor, unusable, and dangerous condition.
The court found that Sehnaoui's decisions ultimately led to more than $10 million in public waste, since the building was never occupied.
In this context, Bassil argued that the court's decision "provided a great service to the FPM," explaining, "they exonerated the guilty and condemned the innocent." He revealed that the Aounist party had submitted to the judiciary in 2008 "a file containing evidence of theft – and not waste – worth over $1 billion, without any authority moving."
"I recently spoke in Parliament and submitted to the investigative committee documents sent to the judiciary. They did not see the billions stolen, but condemned an alleged poor administrative choice they considered waste. This confirms that the judiciary is politicized," he said.
The former foreign minister, also son-in-law to ex-president Michel Aoun, recalled that the FPM had presented an anti-corruption bill on asset declaration for public officials. But this bill was never adopted. "You didn't adopt it, and you never will. Yet, we know what we put forward, and we were the first to declare our accounts and assets," he insisted.
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