Miqati: The Multi-Billionnaire Beggar

Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Miqati, a Sunni Muslim, met in Riyadh with the Sunni Muslim Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia Mohammad Bin Salman (MBS). Lebanese politicians these days have become professional beggars. They travel the world begging other countries and their banks for scraps to lift the Lebanese economy from the throes of death.

Now, PM Miqati is a multi-billionnaire. He has businesses and investments all over the place, including in his home country of Lebanon where he is part and parcel of the corruption paradise in which the country has been for decades. For instance, Liban Poste is the privatized postal service owned by Miqati. In the absence of civilized mail delivery services, no bills or payments can be made by mail in Lebanon. So Miqati forces the Lebanese people to pay for their official transactions (car registrations, driver's license renewals, electricity bill payments, passports, identity cards, and every other state-related procedure, etc.) to be processed via the monopoly of Liban-Poste which obviously skims off hefty fees for processing these transactions. One can obviously pay for these services in person at the various administrations, but have you ever been in an official building in Lebanon? It's a maize of incompetence and corruption, unmarked offices, broken rundown staircases, very dangerous elevators where the frequent interruptions of power could get you stuck in what looks like a bathroom, all of it laced with the stench of tobacco and urine, let alone the endemic leper colony of brokers that loiters there all day. To keep your dignity, you go to Liban Poste instead where they rip you off by adding exorbitant fees to process the service for you, fees that end up in the pockets of the Prime Minister.

At last Monday's cabinet meeting, which was boycotted by half the Ministers in a dispute over the constitutionality of the meeting, Miqati passed a decree in which he forgave himself 90% of a monumental payment his Liban Poste owes the government, by using the exchange rate of 15,000 Lebanese Liras to the dollar instead of the initial 1,500 Lebanese Liras to the dollar rate. The Lebanese Lira has fallen dramatically over the last 3 years because the government couldn't pay its debts to its creditors. By stealthily sneaking this change in the rate to calculate what Miqati owes the government, he ended up paying a few hundred thousand dollars instead of the millions he owes.

A brief background on why the Cabinet meeting was boycotted, giving Miqati a golden opportunity to steal from his own administration: Given that there hasn't been a President of the Republic since last October 31 when Michel Aoun's term ended, and since the President is a Christian by custom and constitution, some Ministers affiliated with a Fascist Christian party, the Free Patriotic Movement of Zebran Basij, boycotted the meeting because, they say, the Sunni Muslim Prime Minister is trying to substitute himself in lieu of the Christian President. Note, though, that it is Basij himself who is blocking the quorum in Parliament and preventing the election of a new president. It's a topsy-turvy country, I tell you.

The interesting thing is that Miqati is in Saudi Arabia to beg MBS and Saudi Arabia to help bankrupt Lebanon. They're both multi-billionnaires, so they understand each other. Now MBS is anti-corruption; a few years ago he imprisoned some of his own ruling elites in a hotel until they paid back what they stole. But Miqati is who he is. He's got enough money to rescue his own country, but not only does he not do that, he's even stealing from his own government and he is begging the Saudis to give him money. Bottom line: MBS told Miqati to go F--- himself because the Miqati government has pro-Iranian Shiite Muslims in it. "It's too early" was the message MBS gave Miqati.