Arch rogue Roger Tamraz has just been released from a Rabat jail. That no extradition papers have been served by the Lebanese government on the disgraced investment banker says much about the poor collective memory of the Lebanese when it comes to those accused of grand theft or financial skullduggery.
Who today cares to remember the downfall in 1966 of Intra Bank, an event that arguably contributed to the unraveling of the fragile Lebanese state and the descent into civil conflict? Maybe we choose to forget because Intra Bank, the largest financial institution in the Middle East, was allowed to collapse for no other reason than Lebanon’s so-called ruling elite could not stomach that so much power was concentrated in the hands of one man — the peerless Yusuf Beidas.
The Lebanese have a great capacity for tolerating corruption. In fact, the bigger the haul, the more they tolerate. Last summer, an elderly woman was overheard at a dinner party commenting on the allegations that Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert had received an illegal payment of $150,000. “What is this nonsense?” she spluttered. “It wouldn’t even pay for a cocktail party.”
It is this attitude that has led to a gradual acceptance of corruption on a grand scale. Tamraz is not vilified. He is merely seen as an adventurer whose only mistake, it appears, was to get caught. It is highly likely that no warrants for his arrest have been issued because he knows too much. Better he remain a shady fugitive.
And yet it is this unwillingness to address theft — let us call a spade a spade — that is arguably holding back Lebanon’s national development. We are willing to take to the streets to protest political and religious causes, so why should we not protest a decades-old culture of corruption, one that has denied us our rightful place among the wider, more regulated, more accountable and more transparent global economic community?
Only when Roger Tamraz and his ilk are hauled in by Lebanese justice can we move forward to a new dawn.
