The Ugly Truth: How Does the Government Plan to Repay Depositors?

After examining how depositors' funds vanished in the previous report, the most critical question remains:

Is there any hope of recovering them?

First, we need to know that:

- 88% of all accounts in banks here are small deposits, meaning less than $100,000.
- 12% of the accounts belong to large depositors.

Today, the latest version of the government's plan states that it will return $100,000 to each depositor, whether large or small.

In this way, the small depositors, or the 88%, will have all their funds returned.

How? According to the plan, the bank will take your balance as of March 31, 2022, and repay you $100,000 in US dollars, to be distributed over a period to be determined later. If your bank cannot secure dollars, it will repay you in Lebanese pounds at the market exchange rate.

However, there is a crucial condition; you must not have transferred your funds from LBP to USD after October 2019 at the 1,500 rate, or else your deposit will be considered "ineligible." In this case, you will be refunded in LBP at an exchange rate lower than the market rate.

The cost of recovering amounts up to $100,000 is about $21 billion.

According to the plan, banks have the resources to cover the mentioned amount, including the reserves at the Central Bank of Lebanon. This is assuming that the central bank can maintain what remains of these reserves and not deplete them further.

Thus, the government's plan considers small deposits and amounts, or $21 billion out of the total deposits of $93.5 billion, to be addressed. But what about the larger deposits? To be continued...