People gather in front of the Grand Serail in Beirut to protest illegal bank restrictions on their deposits on May 9, 2023. (Credit: Mohammad Yassin/L'Orient Today)
BEIRUT — Depositors in Lebanese banks organized a protest at the Riad al-Solh square in Beirut on Thursday calling on the government and Parliament to adopt a fair plan to recover their funds, according to the state-run National News Agency (NNA). During the protest, tires were burned in the square, near the Grand Serail, and a clash broke out between protesters and security forces outside Bank of Beirut, leaving several people injured among the protesters.
The protest was organized by the Depositors’ Association, in cooperation with the Association of Expatriate Depositors, according to the NNA. The protest coincided with a meeting between an International Monetary Fund (IMF) delegation and Finance Ministry officials.
The head of the "Depositors Cry" association, Alaa Khourchid, cited in local media, said that the protest began outside the Grand Serail before moving to the Finance Ministry and then the Ministry of Economy and Trade. “A confrontation broke out on the way as the protesters were heading from the Finance Ministry to the Ministry of Economy and Trade. Former minister Issam Sharafeddine was beaten, according to what we witnessed, by security forces after the road was blocked,” he said, adding that “Sharafeddine was hit in the head and suffered bleeding.” Khourchid noted that another confrontation took place outside the Ministry of Economy, explaining that “the protesters set tires on fire, while security forces intervened to prevent them from doing so."
Earlier this month, the governor of Banque du Liban (BDL, central bank), Karim Souhaid, said he does not expect the law on financial reforms and deposit recovery, also known as the financial gap law, to be passed for another six to eight months, in an interview with CNN Business Arabic.
Published by the government at the end of 2025, the draft law is intended to determine the scale of the losses, how they will be distributed, and the mechanisms for recovering funds that have been locked up since 2019. It remains subject to reservations from the BDL and from the IMF.
After decades of overspending by the country’s ruling elite, which led the economy into a severe crisis at the end of 2019, the banks that year imposed severe restrictions on capital movements, depriving depositors of access to their accounts, and stopped issuing loans.
