Hezbollah Calls on Some Lebanese Banks to Stop ‘Conspiracy’ & ‘Slyness’: Report

Local Editor

Hezbollah urged some banks to refrain from ‘conspiracy’ and ‘slyness’, calling upon the owners of Banks and Lebanon’s Central Bank Governor Riad Salameh to draw back from carrying out the US agenda, well-informed sources told Al-Akhbar newspaper on Saturday.

Some Hezbollah officials say that facing the US banking ‘mandate’ is in no way less important than facing those who want to backstab the Resistance and target its weapons. Others assure that this conflict is ‘inevitable’, Al-Akhbar newspaper mentioned, provided that the owners of some Banks, including Lebanon’s CBG, retract from implementing the US policy.

The paper said US officials show ‘keenness’ to preserve the Lebanese banking sector as one of their most important tools to carry out their policies in the country, an aspiration not shared by Hezbollah when such sector becomes a tool threatening social security in Lebanon, according to March 8 sources. “Such sanctions are tantamount to establishing an ‘Apartheid Wall’ in Lebanon,” the sources said.

The paper quoted the sources as saying that the negative impacts of such decision by some Banks would not be limited to Hezbollah environment, public, or the Shiite sect only, but would harm a wide range of institutions, suppliers and insurance companies, whose owners belong to different regions, communities and political affiliations.

“The Lebanese social security is threatened as a whole, not only a political or sectarian group.”

What Hezbollah wants? The sources answer:

“That banks and Salameh stop conspiracy and beating around the bush. The party just wants measures that would preserve the Lebanese social and economic security and reach a settlement.”

In a weekly meeting for Hezbollah’s Loyalty to Resistance parliamentary bloc, the party warned that remarks by Salameh about the suspension of 100 Hezbollah-linked bank accounts reflect an inclination to renounce national sovereignty.

“The policy of blackmail and various types of pressures that the US administrations practice against countries and forces that are opposed to their policies will never manage to arm-twist Hezbollah or change its stances against the US tyranny and injustice,” the statement read.

The party warned that such policies are doomed to fail and held the government and the Central Bank responsible for protecting Lebanon’s sovereignty and its monetary and social stability.

There’s a growing rage among Hezbollah families and supporters who had called for punitive measures against Banks who submitted to the US decision, but there’s no official decision from the resistance party regarding what measures would it take against those banks.