By Samia Nakhoul
DAVOS, Switzerland, Jan 23 (Reuters) – The International Monetary Fund has demanded amendments to a draft rescue law aimed at hauling Lebanon out of its worst financial crisis on record and giving depositors access to savings frozen for six years, Prime Minister Nawaf Salam said.
The “financial gap” law is part of a series of reform measures required by the IMF in order to access its funding and aims to allocate the losses from Lebanon’s 2019 crash between the state, the central bank, commercial banks and depositors.
Salam told Reuters the IMF wants clearer provisions in the hierarchy of claims, which is a core element of the draft legislation designed to determine how losses are allocated.
“We want to engage with the IMF. We want to improve. This is a draft law,” Salam said in an interview at the World Economic Forum annual meeting in the Swiss mountain resort of Davos.
“They wanted the hierarchy of claims to be clearer. The talks are all positive,” Salam added.
In 2022, the government put losses from the financial crisis at about $70 billion, a figure that analysts and economists forecast is now likely to be higher.
Salam stressed that Lebanon is still pushing for a long-delayed IMF programme, but warned the clock is ticking as the country has already been placed on a financial ‘grey list’ and risks falling onto the ‘black list’ if reforms stall further.
“We want an IMF programme and we want to continue our discussions until we get there,” he said, adding: “International pressure is real … The longer we delay, the more people’s money will evaporate”.
The draft law, which was passed by Salam’s government in December, is under parliamentary review. It aims to give depositors a guaranteed path to recovering their funds, restart bank lending, and end a financial crisis that has left nearly a million accounts frozen and confidence in the system shattered.
The roadmap would repay depositors up to $100,000 over four years, starting with smaller accounts, while launching forensic audits to determine losses and responsibility.
Lebanon’s Finance Minister Yassine Jaber, who is driving the reform push with Salam, told Reuters it was essential to salvage a hollowed-out banking system, and to stop the country from sliding deeper into its cash‑only, paralysed economy.
The aim, Jaber said, is to give depositors clarity after years of uncertainty and to end a system that has crippled Lebanon’s international standing.
He framed the law as part of a broader reckoning: the first time a Lebanese government has confronted a combined collapse of the banking sector, the central bank and the state treasury.
Financial reforms have been repeatedly derailed by political and private vested interests over the last six years and Jaber said the responsibility now lies with lawmakers.
Failure to act, he said, would leave Lebanon trapped in “a deep, dark tunnel” with no way back to a functioning system.
“Lebanon has become a cash economy, and the real question is whether we want to stay on the grey list, or sleepwalk into a black list,” Jaber added.
(Writing by Samia Nakhoul; Editing by Alexander Smith)
Comments