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Muhammad Choucair wrote in Asharq Al-Awsat:
After the Parliament unanimously approved the letter from President Michel Aoun, in which he requested that the accounts of the Banque du Liban, and all other ministries and institutions, be subjected to criminal scrutiny without invoking bank secrecy, this approval it will have no repercussions to adhere to the French roadmap to stop financial and economic collapse unless it is coupled to an executive mechanism, otherwise ink on paper will remain.
The parliamentary session, which was absent from the tensions that prevented it from getting involved in a political confrontation, and which was moderated by the Speaker of Parliament Nabih Berri with great professionalism, ended up adopting the content of the message sent by President Aoun when issuing a decision o This recommendation will not be published in the official gazette, and will not be accompanied by the signature of its incumbent and exiled Prime Minister Hassan, Diab. Because he was appointed to listen to the message without extending it to a legislative session that allows legalizing the recommendation by proposing a law to be approved by the General Assembly in Parliament.
Parliamentary sources attribute the reason to the adherence to article 145 of the Parliament’s ordinance, which limits the agenda of the session by listening to the president’s message, and confirm that President Berri, prior approval of the General Committee of the recommendation, in response to the letter’s request, to open a legislative session dedicated to the approval of the representatives of the proposal. The law presented by the parliamentary bloc “Development and Liberation” headed by Berri, which aims to consider all the victims of the attack on the port of Beirut as martyrs of the Lebanese army.
Therefore, the parliament’s adoption of Aoun’s message returned the ball to the goal of the resigned government, which is supposed to put in place the legal and judicial mechanism to implement the financial criminal audit, which is no longer limited to Banque du Liban accounts, but includes the ministries and all departments, interests and funds, and therefore it is necessary to hire an alternative company to a company. Audit «Alvarez & Mersal», which terminated the contract with the Ministry of Finance due to the impossibility of obtaining documents and financial documents.
In this context, parliamentary sources told Al-Sharq Al-Awsat that the resigned government is now obliged to legalize the financial criminal audit of state accounts, although there are those who oppose handing over this power to a resigned government, because it can only summon under compelling and exceptional circumstances that do not apply to them. Audit of financial accounts.
The sources indicated that it is not allowed to skip the need to legalize the audit process, and this was testified by a witness from his family, referring to the charge issued at the end of the session by the head of the Parliamentary Committee for Administration and Justice, Deputy George Adwan, who was the spearhead in the attacks against the governor of the Central Bank of Lebanon. Riad Salameh, and lobbied in support of Aoun’s message, and said that there is no escape, as he said, from legalizing the financial audit.
The same sources confirmed that it had been previously, after the “Taif Agreement”, that Parliament approved the budget of a resigned government, and they saw that the current government cannot present a bill by which it wants to legalize financial auditing, and they attributed the reason to two things: The first is that the priority must be It is given to discuss next year’s budget, so this matter cannot be ignored with the expiration of the constitutional deadline to submit the budget project to Parliament for your discussion and approval.
Regarding the second issue, according to parliamentary sources, the resigned government cannot sign a contract with a financial auditing company, because it needs a new expense contract to cover the cost of this audit, and this prevents the government from insuring it, because conducts business on a small scale.
Consequently, the question remains: how will the government act? Where will you secure the money for the new audit firm that you are supposed to hire? Although there are those who attribute the termination of the services of the auditing company “Alvarez & Mersal” to the fact that the Central Bank of France entrusted the audit task to a team affiliated to it, and was assigned to Beirut to contribute to the audit of the accounts.
This question opens the door to what is being reported in narrow rooms that there is a tendency to float the Diab government, despite the fact that it will meet an opposition parliamentary verdict, and it was recently reported that Diab does not intend to walk floating his government, which lacks a minimum level of ministerial solidarity, in addition to being considered a leap. In the unknown, it is intended to circumvent French efforts to dispel the obstacles that still delay the birth of the new government.
Likewise, Diab’s floating government will encounter a constitutional violation and international rejection, forcing him to apply more siege to it, although there are those who justify such a step with the existence of a precedent before the Taif Agreement that led to the floating of the government of President Salim al-Hoss after he presented his resignation to the then president. Elias Sarkis.
In light of the above, it can be said that Aoun has no solution to activate the decision on financial criminal audit, except by initiating the resumption of consultations with Prime Minister-designate Saad Hariri, in order to reach an understanding to accelerate the birth government, after it has been proven that maintaining business conduct will worsen the situation and negatively affect the situation. A “strong era” that will not be able to lift a finger to trigger the financial audit.
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