The Chairman of MTV Channel and “Studio Vision” Company, Michel Gabriel El Murr, will be tried at the Court of Appeals on December 9 on charges of public funds embezzlement and tax evasion, according to a report posted by Al-Ahed News Website.
The report clarified that El Murr is accused of infringing on the public telecommunication system by pirating the international phone calls which, by law, are monopolized by the government, adding that he was acquitted in 2018 and that the authorities appealed the verdict later.
Judiciary sources told Al Ahed Website that El Murr may never be acquitted at the Court of Appeals because documents and solid proof condemn him for depriving the state’s treasury of big amounts of money, the report added.
The story started in 2012, when El Murr purchased an E1 line which allows him to have a wide range of communication services via the Internet, installing special equipment and receivers to redirect the international phone calls from the government’s communication posts to his company.
Accordingly, his line will turn the expensive international calls to cheap local one, depriving the treasury from hundreds of thousands of dollars.
In this war, El Murr also sells the phone callers for half of the cost they pay it to the government in return for the international phone calls, according to the report.
The judiciary sources added that proofs and pieces of evidence El Murr’s E1 line witnessed a weird rise in the number of calls and the value of bills in comparison with other main companies, like LBCI and Blom Bank.
The sources pointed out that in May , 2016, the line was deactivated for two days and that El Murr realized at that time that he was caught red-handed because the number of calls after the deactivation is much less than that before it.
The following table shows how the calls fell from 5137 on 10/05/2016, one day before the line was deactivated, to 118 on the first day of the line’s reactivation.
The judiciary sources also pointed out that El Murr is accused of tax evasion because the large amounts of money he got out of this conspicuous piracy did not pass through the legal procedures of the government; thus, he avoided paying the taxes which come in this context.
Finally, the judiciary sources stressed that El Murr may never be able to be acquitted because the documents and proofs are enough to sentence him for three years in jail and force him to repay the financial losses he inflicted upon the state’s treasury (estimated to be around one million US dollars).
Source: Al-Ahed News Website (Edited and translated by Al-Manar English Website)
Related
- Lebanese Army Reopens Roads Blocked by Bandits in Various Cities
- Fake Twitter Account Pretends to Be Al-Manar’s
River to Sea
Uprooted Palestinian 
The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Blog!
