SAWT BEIRUT INTERNATIONAL

| 26 April 2024, Friday |

Bassil accuses house speaker of forcibly depriving president of the republic of his powers

FPM leader, MP Gebran Bassil held a televised press conference on Sunday, saying that “the false wing of the revolution protected itself with the slogan “everyone means everyone” to target us alone, while the real slogan should have been “everyone except for us.”

“Our political system is disrupting itself because the Taif Agreement was aimed at keeping Lebanon governed from the outside, and only the President is confined with deadlines, and all our calls for rectification, calmly and through a dialogue table, have been ignored,” Bassil stressed.

He accused the Speaker of forcibly depriving the President of the Republic of his powers by the House of Representatives and the Constitutional Council, and stripping the rest of the sects of their right to rotate over the ministries of finance and interior.

“This centralized state has failed under your leadership and because of your system, and we do not want to live in a failed state and a centralized state that we want to be civil and secular,” the MP said.

Bassil alao attacked the Central Bank Governor, Riad Salameh, who is politically protected from the political system, saying: “He is the head of the financial system and as a battle-leading officer who carried out the largest organized robbery of people’s money and prevented other judges from prosecuting him.”

Regarding the understanding with Hezbollah, he stressed that he does not want to cancel the Mar Mikhael agreement, but rather “we want to develop it.”

He said, “We supported the resistance against Israel and ISIS, and we supported it politically, not with money or lives, and we obtained political support from it to consolidate rights through partnership and national balance.”

Bassil also commented about the US sanctions against him, noting that he had submitted a request to lift the “unjust and false accusations of alleged corruption against him, and to prove this with documents according to the American law, the Freedom of Information Act.”

    Source:
  • NNA