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July 01, 2020 | 12 Pages | English | Karim Daher
How Should Lebanon Recover Its Stolen Public Assets?

The October 2019 protests and the ensuing financial crisis brought on the forefront discussions on the country’s endemic corruption, plundered economy, and the decades-long theft of its public assets and funds. Demands such as accountability, fighting corruption, and recovering those stolen assets became popularized and have become protesters’ non-negotiable requests. In response, the ruling political elite tried to ride the wave of demonstrations and use these demands as being theirs. They raised appealing slogans such as fighting corruption and bringing back stolen public assets as being their own fights.
 
An Anti-Money Laundering Law passed in 2015 categorizes cases of illicit enrichment and corruption—such as bribery, influence peddling, embezzlement, and abuse of power—as crimes. They are considered as leading to money laundering by ways of concealing the actual source of illicit funds and providing false justification to them, or by transferring, moving, exchanging, or employing funds. Unlike common knowledge, Lebanon does have mechanisms and laws put in place to fight these crimes.
 
Recovering looted funds is a long and difficult journey but not an impossible one, as many other countries have done it before. This policy brief aims to shed light on how to prosecute public servants accused of stealing public assets, and how to bring those stolen assets back home. It addresses three levels on this matter: First, it goes into detail on the how to collect the needed data on stolen public assets. Second, it identifies and enumerates the various mechanisms and ways Lebanon could use to prosecute culprits, while differentiating between two types of legal provisions, depending on who is accused of corruption. Third, the brief explains how Lebanon can retrieve stolen assets held outside the country.