Al Jadeed were hosting a financial advisor called Samer Salameh who’s specialized in saving crumbling companies, and he offered quite a thorough analysis on the situation with numbers and steps to implement to get out of this mess. More importantly, he shed light on BDL’s situation and the real reason behind government’s budget deficit, noting that the budget deficit is mainly due to the outrageous expenses (75% of them are salaries) we have, add to that 5 billion in debt interest only, versus 12 billions in revenues only yearly.
I watched the whole episode. I don’t know how qualified this man is, but it’s crystal clear that this ruling class is NOT taking the right measures so far to handle the crisis, which comes as NO surprise as they’re trying to get their hands on our money now.
Here are few numbers from his presentation:
2019 revenues: $12bn
Expenses: $12bn ( $8bn salaries, $2bn electricity)
Debt interest: $5bn
Total Expenses: $17bn
Deficit: $5bn
In regards to the situation of BDL and the banks, he specified that $10bn were transferred outside Lebanon during the 6 weeks BEFORE the revolution.
Out of the $176bn dollars in banks:
$20bn in real estate
$20bn in business loans/trade
$22bn in capital requirements at BDL
BDL Situation:
$110bn from banks to BDL
65% of bank deposits are in BDL
BDL has $31bn in cash, $6bn in investments, $13bn in assets. Total without the gold reserves (estimated at around $12bn) is $50bn.
The missing $60bn were presumably spent on government debt and expenses.
This is an excerpt from the interview:
Full interview [here].