Al Arabiya did not host Riad Salameh in his capacity as the former governor of the Banque du Liban, who is facing lawsuits and travel bans in more than six countries, including five European states. Instead, it hosted him as a financial and economic “expert,” asking him about the miracle cure for the Lebanese economy.
It did not question him about his responsibility in the theft of the deposits of more than 1.5 million Lebanese citizens. Instead, it asked him, “How can we recover the deposits?” As for the fifteen months the former governor spent in a five-star prison, his interviewer turned them into a “humanitarian ordeal,” asking him about the suffering he endured during that period. This is despite the fact that we know, by Salameh’s own testimony, that he was held in a prison closer to a hotel, where this inmate enjoyed full health, nutritional, and social care.
We are not going to speak here about the professional scandal represented by Al Arabiya’s television interview with Riad Salameh. Rather, we will raise an ethical question about whether the channel is at all concerned with the suffering of more than a million Lebanese people caused by the largest financial scandal in history, for which the channel’s guest and guest of honor was one of the main figures responsible.
Yes, we are not talking here about a passing professional mistake, but about an editorial decision to host the primary official responsible for the “Ponzi scheme,” as classified by the World Bank.
Strangely, during the interview, Salameh went as far as to downplay his interviewer’s attempts to absolve him of responsibility for what happened, insisting that he was not the only one responsible for the collapse. Our colleague, however, failed to seize on Salameh’s own signals to pursue the question of the extent of his responsibility.
Beyond being a professional lapse, the interview was also baffling. How can one conduct a full hour-long interview with Riad Salameh without asking him about the Forry and Optimum companies? Not a single question was directed at him about the financial engineering operations that all experts, including Lebanese bank owners, agree were “the scam of the age.” Even the forty million dollars for which he is being prosecuted in Lebanon today remained outside the journalist’s radar, despite Salameh referring to it more than once during his remarks.
It is clear that during the interview the channel was chiefly concerned with the responsibility of its adversary, Hezbollah, for the financial collapse, a responsibility that is beyond dispute, since Riad Salameh’s financial engineering was designed to prevent the “state of Hezbollah” from collapsing. But the one who designed this engineering was the channel’s man, Riad Salameh, and those who benefited from it were the corruption network that includes, alongside Hezbollah, the channel’s political and banking allies. We are speaking here of Saad Hariri and his bank (Bankmed), Najib Mikati and his partners in Bank Audi, and Gebran Bassil in partnership with Cedrus Bank. Yet the interviewer’s questions were limited to only one of these figures, Gebran Bassil, who has no friendly ties to the political alignment represented by the channel. When these partners are named, it is not out of emotional reaction but on the basis of documented facts established by investigative reports that the interviewer failed to examine, not for the sake of condemning his guest, but simply to preserve his own professional credibility as a journalist.
Naturally, Salameh’s appearance now, after the military defeat suffered by Hezbollah in the war, suggests, among other things, that the man believes a window of survival has opened. He said that the responsibility for bankruptcy lies with the government of the Shiite duo, while avoiding any mention that his friend Najib Mikati was at the head of that government. And when he referred to the responsibility of Michel Aoun, the interviewer did not ask him about the fact that Aoun himself had imposed the renewal of Salameh’s final term as governor of the Banque du Liban.
As for the message one can infer from Salameh’s use of Al Arabiya’s screen in his case, it lies in his repeated references to what he claims is his deteriorating health, something we did not observe in any case, and which raises suspicion that he may seek to use it to slow down his prosecution, at least in the case of the proven transfers through the Forry company, one of the many issues the interviewer failed to question him about.
What one can remind the channel of is that its guest was one of those responsible for a catastrophe that was not only financial, but also humanitarian. Dozens, even hundreds of Lebanese died at hospital doors after losing their healthcare protection, and today they live in a state of medical abandonment because of a monstrous corruption network whose “accountant” the channel hosted yesterday. During this interview, Al Arabiya did not represent the interests of the victims or their suffering, as our profession requires it to do.
