Woman, 90, stages sit-in at Beirut bank to obtain her deposit
Lebanon’s dire financial crisis once again came under the spotlight on Tuesday when a 90-year-old woman staged a sit-in at a Beirut bank, demanding her deposit, which has been frozen for three years.
Edro Khider, a disabled woman, was brought 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 had intensified during October, and depositors demanding their money included retired security officers, a member of parliament 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 … but now we are no longer able to cover the cost of medical treatment. “My mother saved this amount over the years from the money we gave her. She saved $100-200 each time and put it in the bank for a rainy day. That day has come, and they are not allowing her to get the deposit.”
He said his father, also in his 90s, needs open-heart surgery, and he has a financial deposit in the bank that the bank refuses to release. Khider said: “Security forces surround the bank, but they are not interested in what happens inside the bank. The bank’s management informed me that they are ready to release the deposit according to Resolution 158, which means that they 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 government to resolve the issue. Lebanese banks accuse the government of having withdrawn through the central bank $62.670 trillion in deposits and wasting the money on subsidies, fixing the exchange rate, high interests, electricity and the state’s import needs.
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 say that the banks and the state are both guilty of looting people’s deposits.
Edro Khider, a disabled woman, was brought 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.