The Bank Robbers Who Are Stealing Their Own Money

One morning last September, Sali livestreamed the family heist. She charged toward the counter of a Blom branch in Beirut, brandishing her nephew’s plastic toy handgun. The clerks screamed and took cover. Standing atop a table, tucking the dummy weapon into the waistband of her black jeans as though she did this every day, Sali yelled: “I came here today to get my sister’s money.” To show they were serious, Ikram poured the gasoline over her own head and threatened to set herself alight if the employees didn’t hand over the cash. Soon, she was holding a clerk by the collar as he fed fistfuls of US dollars into a money-counting machine. The sisters stuffed $13,000 into bags—enough to get Nancy’s treatment started—and fled the scene, ditching the fake gun outside.

Later that week, their mother, Hiam Hafiz, appeared on the local news, but not to implore her girls to give themselves up. “We did not take money that was not ours,” she said. “This was our money that we put in the bank.”

The Hafiz sisters’ heist was one of eight such incidents in a single month in Lebanon, as desperate depositors turned to bank robbery to reclaim their savings. A run of overlapping catastrophes had pushed them to this point, including the deadly 2020 explosion at Beirut’s port, which killed at least 218 people. At the center of the pain, however, was the ongoing meltdown of the country’s banking system, which has led Lebanese commercial banks to impose severe capital controls and lock citizens out of their life savings. The World Bank describes it as “likely to rank in the top 10, possible top three, most severe crisis episodes globally since the mid-19th century.”

The epicenter is Lebanon’s central bank, the Banque du Liban. Riad Salameh has run the place for just shy of 30 years, making him the longest continuously serving central bank governor in the world. During most of that time, he claimed to champion a stable, conservative philosophy of monetary policy and presided over what appeared to be booming prosperity, as swaths of the capital transformed from battlefields scarred by civil war into sleek boulevards lined with high-end restaurants. For many years, the posher streets of Beirut were jammed with sports cars; above them, residents popped Champagne at rooftop bars overlooking the Mediterranean Sea.

Unfortunately, behind this era of easy money was what the World Bank and leaders including French President Emmanuel Macron have described as a Ponzi scheme. When times got tougher, the Banque du Liban began struggling to pay its debts, and the country’s commercial banks started teetering, too. To buy time, Salameh handed out a couple rounds of cheap credit. But eventually he arrived at a more desperate solution, leaning on the commercial banks themselves to plug holes in his cash reserves. As the populace began to feel the pain from rising costs of living, this setup, too, stalled out, and the financial system collapsed.

Today, Lebanon’s economy is in shambles. Inflation topped 170% last year, and credit-ratings agencies say this year could be worse. The average Lebanese citizen with money in the bank can expect a deal like the Hafiz family was offered: a relative pittance from their savings, every so often. What this means is that former members of Beirut’s middle class are begging on the street. Robberies for food, basic medicines, baby formula and diapers have been on the rise. “They have legalized stealing our money,” says Ibrahim Abdallah, a member of the Depositors’ Outcry Association, a protest group that helped the Hafiz sisters plan their heist. “People here, we just want to survive.”

Salameh, who repeatedly declined to comment for this story, has said he’ll leave his post in July rather than seek another six-year term. Ahead of his intended retirement to his villa overlooking Beirut, his most loyal companions might be his Cohibas. One financial analyst who meets regularly with him, and spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of professional reprisals, says the governor doesn’t put down his latest cigar even to shake hands. “From time to time, when he speaks in long sentences, the cigar goes out,” the person says. “He relights it and carries on.”

In May, French and German prosecutors issued arrest warrants for Salameh in connection with an investigation that stretches across six countries. The allegations include buying real estate in those countries using millions of dollars in stolen Lebanese public funds. (Salameh has said the charges are politically motivated and called the French warrant illegal.) At home, however, Salameh has remained remarkably untouchable. He’s been free to chain-smoke cigars in his office while a vanishing middle class has been left to consider its options, all of them desperate.

Salameh spent the first two decades of his career at Merrill Lynch in Beirut and Paris, eventually becoming a portfolio manager for wealthy clients including Lebanese industrialist Rafik Hariri. When Hariri became Lebanon’s prime minister in the early years after the nation’s devastating 15-year civil war, he brought Salameh back with him, making him the central bank governor in 1993. “Riad,” says former Vice Governor Nasser Saidi, sighing as he utters his old boss’s name, “is not an economist. He was a broker.” Saidi says Salameh’s original sin was his 1997 decision to peg the Lebanese pound to the US dollar, allowing both currencies to be used interchangeably. For dozens of countries around the world, the dollar peg makes it cheaper to conduct financial transactions and international trade, which are typically conducted in US dollars. But for this fixed exchange rate to hold, Lebanon would need to have lots of dollars coming in at all times.

Even early in his tenure, Salameh demonstrated a gift for politics. He forged and maintained alliances with each of the many factions in Lebanon’s fragile status quo, including the militant group Hezbollah, charming them in tandem with European and American diplomats. His closeness to the warlords-turned-politicians among Lebanon’s ruling elite led almost everyone interviewed for this story to refer to him as “the mafia’s accountant.” But as the new millennium dawned, the currency peg seemed to be working, spurring investment from throughout Europe and across the Persian Gulf. US dollars flowed into many of the 4 million Lebanese in-country from the more than double that number in the diaspora. The real estate sector boomed, and Lebanon seemed to “defy financial gravity,” in the words of one former US ambassador.

This two-step also presented an opportunity for middlemen, including those in the Salameh family. In 2001, Salameh’s brother Raja founded a company in the British Virgin Islands called Forry Associates. For more than a decade, according to a 2022 Reuters investigation, the Banque du Liban charged commercial banks commissions on their purchases of government securities without disclosing that the bulk of those commissions went to Forry. European authorities have said they suspect Raja’s company transferred more than $300 million in profits to Swiss bank accounts. The Salamehs have denied wrongdoing, but Lebanese and European authorities have spent years investigating how they and their associates went on to buy tens of millions of dollars in properties throughout Europe. In France, the mother of one of Salameh’s admitted children from an extramarital affair is facing questions about how she came to own a property on Paris’ most famous shopping boulevard, the Champs-Élysées, which investigators in Beirut allege she leased back to the Banque du Liban to use as office space.

“There is something inherently elusive and slippery about Salameh,” Jeffrey Feltman, then the US ambassador to Lebanon, wrote in a 2007 diplomatic cable later published by WikiLeaks. By then, Salameh had won favor with the US and was visiting Washington and Damascus for strategic meetings about a possible run for Lebanon’s presidency. (In another cable from earlier that year, Feltman recounted a Rotary Club dinner during which, he said, Salameh replied to a question about his policy priorities with: “Get me the presidency and I’ll tell you.”) The ambassador concluded that a President Salameh would be a bad idea because of “the questionable way the Central Bank is run, with far less transparency and many more questionable practices than Salameh’s stellar reputation would have one believe.”

For the people of Lebanon, times were good. Salameh’s regulations helped the country largely dodge the global financial meltdown of 2008, and by 2010 about 1 in 5 cars on its roads were made by Mercedes-Benz. A year later, Chanel opened a standalone boutique in downtown Beirut. A booming financial sector gave rise to a thriving upper-middle class with its pick of holiday homes overseas. Salameh and his policies got the credit, and the halo effect enabled him to brush off pressure from ministers to sell some of the central bank’s more extravagant assets, including a private jet and a casino.

Not long after, however, clouds began to gather. After 2011, as a popular uprising in neighboring Syria twisted into a brutal civil war, foreign investors began turning away from the region, and the US dollar inflows that sustained Lebanon’s economy dropped sharply, tipping the country deeper into debt. Salameh’s solution was to dole out financial relief for struggling banks, beginning in late 2015 with BankMed SAL and Bank Audi SAL. Both were major national financial institutions, and the family of former Prime Minister Hariri, who was assassinated in 2005, controlled the former and had a stake in the latter. (Both banks declined to comment, though Bank Audi has said its treatment matched its size.) Other banks followed.

The Banque du Liban kept US dollars flowing through the country’s financial sector by offering troubled financial institutions extremely generous interest rates, but this was a short-term solution. The central bank didn’t have the funds to cover that interest or all the deposits, so it began a secret, complex siphoning of funds from commercial banks to meet its near-term obligations. In the meantime, its asset Middle East Airlines bought a second private jet for use by Salameh and elite clients.

By 2018 the Banque du Liban was creating assets out of thin air. An audit report from that year, later leaked widely, lays bare some of Salameh’s creative accounting. Notably, he assigned an annual financial value to Lebanon’s long-term financial stability, termed “seniorage,” then added it as a credit on the bank’s balance sheet. According to the audit report, Salameh was empowered to determine this amount “as deemed appropriate by him.”

A sense of unsustainability was seeping into Beirut. While crowds of playboys were taking out loans to buy fancy cars and watches, inflation and austerity measures were pushing the basic cost of living beyond the reach of many. In 2019, when the government proposed steep new taxes, protesters flooded the streets, gathering amid clouds of tear gas in front of the Parliament building to demand that the country’s leaders step down. In response, Salameh closed the banks for two weeks. When they reopened, the long lines of depositors still didn’t know how bad things were about to get. Over the following months, the banks imposed steadily harsher withdrawal limits, particularly on overseas transfers. Businesses closed, joblessness soared, and in March 2020, Prime Minister Hassan Diab declared on national TV that the country would default on a $1.2 billion bond rather than repay it.

Salameh shrugged off blame for the financial crisis in a televised speech the following year. “This engineering, we were forced to do it to buy time for Lebanon, so Lebanon could reform,” he said. He implied that government leaders had supported him. Even so, attendees at a meeting at the presidential palace that summer say Salameh rebuffed demands from ministers to provide a simple list of the central bank’s assets and debts. He didn’t seem all that big on team spirit.

In June 2021, Salameh took a private jet to a small airport in northern Paris. When he arrived, he told customs officials he was carrying €15,000 ($16,100) for a trip to meet with Lebanese bankers working in France. But while inspecting his bags, the officials spotted stacks of banknotes and grew suspicious, according to a police report later leaked to , a Lebanese newspaper. They donned surgical gloves to count the bills, which were in US dollars and euros, including 47 of the €500 notes dubbed the “bin Laden” for their link to illicit activity. In total, Salameh was carrying close to €91,000. When customs officials asked him why his suitcases contained so much undeclared cash, he told them, “I forgot it was there.” After several hours of questioning, he paid a fine of €2,700 and continued on with the rest of the money.

By then, the audit report from 2018 had long since leaked to the public. Soon after Salameh’s Paris trip, protesters filled the street outside the central bank offices, screaming that it was time for him and others to go. They couldn’t see the governor. The heavy beige curtains running along both sets of windows in his cavernous corner office remained permanently shut. But inside, according to the financial analyst who meets regularly with him, Salameh could faintly hear their cries. If the protests bothered him, he didn’t let it show. “He has this incredible sense of impunity,” the analyst says. “He must be a hell of a poker player. You couldn’t read anything on his face.”

Since then, Salameh has largely confined himself to his office while millions of Lebanese citizens have access only to tiny slivers of their savings. Aayad Sarka, a depositor-turned-protester, says he stopped taking heart medications because he can no longer afford them and pulled out his own teeth at home instead of paying to see a dentist.

More than a few protesters say the relative success of heists like the Hafiz sisters’ has made armed-ish robberies look like their least-worst option. Among them is Pascal Rassi, a physician who sold his practice in the early days of the financial crisis and put the entire $100,000 in proceeds in the bank. (“I was naive,” he says.) The monthly $200 in pounds the bank has offered him doesn’t cover necessities such as heating or treatment for his fibromyalgia. He’s tried pleading. He’s tried a hunger strike. On one occasion, he tied himself to a chair in his local branch with a cable. Now he’s no longer allowed in. “It’s the banks who are the thieves!” he exclaims. “Someone who takes their own money is not a thief!”

As Salameh’s vice governor, Wassim Mansouri, prepares to take over the Banque du Liban on an interim basis, demonstrators are increasingly targeting heads of commercial banks, and Abdallah says he fears some depositors will consider assassinations to be fair punishment. Some executives must also worry about getting swept up in the probe targeting Salameh. In April, French prosecutors indicted AM Bank SAL Chairman Marwan Kheireddine for alleged money laundering and criminal conspiracy. In mid-May, French prosecutors charged Salameh in absentia with criminal conspiracy, organized money laundering and aggravated tax evasion. A week later, German prosecutors issued an arrest warrant on similar charges. (Salameh hasn’t responded publicly to the German allegations, nor has Kheireddine to the French ones.)

Salameh is unlikely to face extradition. Disgraced auto executive Carlos Ghosn has been chilling in Lebanon since 2019, when he jumped bail in Japan. Like Ghosn, though, Salameh is running short on other places he can go. Besides Europe, he’s lost favor in the US, too. The Treasury Department repeatedly called out the Banque du Liban in January, when it placed sanctions on a currency trader it said “plays a key role” in allowing Hezbollah to exploit the Lebanese crisis. But Lebanon might not be safe for Salameh after his retirement, either. At this point, he’s so unpopular that he could end up a scapegoat for the rest of the country’s ruling class—who are, after all, the ones who kept him on.

When the financial crisis began, Gebran Bassil was the senior adviser to Lebanon’s then-president, Michel Aoun, who’s also his father-in-law. Bassil is a long-serving, powerful minister who heads the Christian nationalist party called Free Patriotic Movement. (He was also personally sanctioned by the US Treasury Department in 2020 over allegations of corruption, which he dismisses as politically motivated.) He now says that he and Aoun wanted to get rid of Salameh at the end of the governor’s last term six years ago, long before the banks shut down, but that US officials talked them out of it. “Salameh is servicing the interests of a political system,” Bassil says, leaning back in a leather armchair in an expansive duplex with panoramic views of Beirut. A Cohiba-branded ashtray is sitting on the coffee table between us, though Bassil says he’s no longer a cigar guy. “I can’t predict what his future will be,” he says. “All I can say is that it’ll be very bad.”

For many ordinary Lebanese, things are already bad and getting worse. Beirut streetlights no longer switch on at night, because the state electric utility is low on both fuel and funds. Lebanon has been without a president since Aoun resigned in October, and the government has seemed all the more paralyzed. But this anarchy has also left room for folk heroes. Nancy Hafiz used her heist-procured family savings to begin treatment for brain cancer in Turkey, and unlike Salameh, her sisters appear unafraid to show their faces in public.

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