Lebanese citizens are increasingly turning to sit-in blockades, and outright armed robbery, to pry their savings out of frozen bank accounts as the national economy continues its trajectory toward total collapse.
“A saver enters the bank, we’re outside. We’re like, ‘Yeah! Do it. Come on!’ We give them some motivation,” explained Cry of the Depositors spokesman Ibrahim Abdallah. Abdallah described himself to NPR as a millionaire real estate tycoon who can no longer afford to eat dinner at restaurants because all of his money is frozen.
Some of Lebanon’s desperate bank robbers have employed toy guns, and a few have succeeded in getting a portion of their funds from the bank, although they were arrested soon afterward. To date, no one has been injured during the robberies, although the security forces protecting the banks are increasingly well-armed.
Other Lebanese depositors are leading protests or staging sit-ins to obtain their money, such as 53-year-old Zhara Khaled, who parked her wheelchair in a Tripoli bank and refused to leave until she was given some of her tens of thousands of dollars in frozen savings – money she said she needed to obtain medical treatment. She is wheelchair-bound because she lost one leg to diabetes and is now experiencing ominous pains in the other.“The bank brought the cops down on us.
Lebanese officials admitted some of the hard currency in Lebanon’s banks was spirited out of the country, other funds have been siphoned from bank reserves to pay for government programs, and a good deal of the money is probably gone forever. Depositors are only allowed toa tiny fraction of their money, officially capped at $500 per month, although some individual banks have even lower limits.
Banking sources say several banks in Lebanon are preparing to decrease the withdrawal limits they allow under the terms of Banque du Liban's Circular 161:
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