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BEIRUT: How ordinary Lebanese are suffering during the country’s financial crisis came under the spotlight on Tuesday when a 90-year-old woman staged a sit-in at a Beirut bank, demanding her deposit that is frozen for three years.
Edro Khider, a disabled woman, was carried by her son to the Bank Audi branch in the Salim Salam neighborhood in Beirut. When the bank’s management refused to release the $20,000 deposit, the woman decided to stage a sit-in inside the bank.
Bank holdups by depositors decreased during the current month, after they intensified during October, and included retired security men, a parliament MP, and businessmen.
Hussein Khider, the elderly woman’s son, told Arab News: “We are in the bank and will not leave until we get the deposit. My elderly mother and father need the equivalent of $1,000 per month for medicines and medical examinations, and we can no longer afford them. We, the four children, can no longer afford this exorbitant amount.”
Khider said his mother has been sick for five years, and during this period “we did not demand the deposit, and we did not sign any agreement with the bank to obtain it according to the decisions that authorize it to be paid in installments, but now we are no longer able to cover the cost of medical treatment.
“My mother saved the amount over the years from the money we gave her. She saved $100-200 each time and put them in the bank for the rainy day. The day has come, and they are not allowing her to get the deposit.”
He said his father, also in his 90s, needed open-heart surgery, and he has a financial deposit in the bank, but the bank refused to release, and now he lives on medicines that prolong his life to a minimum.”
Khider said: “The security forces surround the bank, but they are not interested in what happens inside the bank. The bank’s management informed me that it is ready to release the deposit according to Resolution 158, which means that it will give us $4,000. The bank manager said that he will give us an additional gift of $2,000. We refused; we want the full amount. Is he giving it to me from his pocket? It’s my mother’s money.”
He described the negotiations with the bank’s management as “procrastination, and no one is interested in a solution. There is an incomprehensible indifference.”
Musa Ghazi, the media official of the Depositors Outcry Association, which is following up on the case of Khider and his mother, told Arab News that “more tragic cases will be witnessed by banks in the coming days.”
Bank holdups by depositors came as a result of the failure of the political authority to resolve the issue.
Lebanese banks accuse the political authority of having withdrawn from banks, through the central bank, $62.670 trillion of deposits and wasting money on subsidies, fixing the exchange rate, high interests, electricity, the state’s import needs, and others.
The Association of Banks says that “the public sector has squandered the funds of the private sector. The state and its institutions have squandered the funds of depositors and the capital of bank shareholders.
“The most dangerous thing that the public sector has done is that it has placed the responsibility of solving its problems on the private sector and reached into its savings. Today, the state distances itself and establishes itself as arbiter between depositors and banks.”
Depositors accuse the banks of smuggling their money and the money of politicians abroad, and that the banks and the state are both accused of looting people’s deposits.