New Financial Lawsuit Targets Riad Salameh, His Brother, and His Girlfriend Stephanie Saliba

Banque du Liban filed a new complaint against its former governor Riad Salameh and a number of his family members in a new financial file added to the cases linked to suspicious transfers in recent years.

The lawsuit, submitted to the Financial Public Prosecution, included Raja Salameh, Riad Salameh's brother, and his girlfriend Stephanie Saliba (a Lebanese actress).

According to available information, this new file emerged after the discovery of transfers that were passing through the company "Forey" belonging to Raja Salameh, later revealing another financial path through a company named "V-Invest," to which more than 70 million dollars were transferred.

The gravity of this file, according to the data, lies in the fact that the aforementioned company is not a consulting firm or a financial or investment institution as its name might suggest, but is actually a company operating in the shipping sector, raising major question marks about how it was used to pass this large volume of funds.

Information indicates that Raja Salameh is the authorized signatory for the company, while it is suspected that the actual beneficiaries of the transferred funds are members of the Salameh family, directly or indirectly.

According to the data, the funds passed through the aforementioned company within a complex financial mechanism, where the company was used as a front to hide the transfer routes and redistribute the funds away from direct oversight, in what is suspected to be part of an integrated financial system aimed at concealing the real beneficiaries of the operations.

The Financial Public Prosecutor, Judge Fouad Mourad, received the complaint and the attached documents, and began studying the file in preparation for setting a hearing date and launching judicial investigations.

The bank said in a statement that, in contrast to this scene, the current governor of Banque du Liban, Karim Saeed, has adopted a completely opposite approach, based on opening files that for years were surrounded by political and financial taboos, and proceeding on a clear path to track funds, transfers, and companies used in draining the monetary institution's assets.

According to monitoring circles, Saeed is waging a real battle to uncover what happened inside Banque du Liban, and to recover what can be recovered of depositors' funds, based on a firm conviction that protecting depositors does not begin with slogans, but by uncovering the networks that contributed to squandering their money and holding accountable all those involved in turning the central bank into a private financial farm.