A view from the other side

Law 161 was passed five years ago to create a financial regulatory agency and structure capital markets in Lebanon. Some market players are becoming restive and others are criticizing omissions in the law’s implementation and aspects of the CMA’s methods. To understand how things look from the CMA’s perspective, Executive sat down with CMA Executive Board Member Firas Safieddine for an exhaustive conversation.    E   How do you measure the performance of the Capital Markets Authority since the adoption of Law 161 in August 2011? We can measure ourselves on many scales and have only been here for four years. First, we had to hire the people. Before that, it took us a year to get funding from the government. It was approved, but it took us seven months before we got the money. [In that time] we could not hire because we could not pay salaries. When the