BEIRUT: Lebanon will soon transfer overdue telecoms revenue to municipalities, the finance minister pledged Friday, while calling into question millions in missing revenues.
“We are committed to distributing the accumulating funds to the municipalities and we will continue demanding answers and seeking accountability for those who neglected to grant the municipalities their lawful rights,” Ali Hasan Khalil told reporters in a news conference at his ministry.
“The municipalities should be confident that we, as politicians and officials in the government, will secure your right to access the funds.”
He said he was in the process of drafting a decree that would put forward a mechanism to distribute the revenues to municipalities.
Municipalities have been demanding that the government released telecoms revenues similar to what happened in 2013.
Former Telecoms Minister Nicolas Sehnaoui has accused successive governments in Lebanon of withholding these funds from the municipalities and using most of them to settle part of the budget deficit.
Despite repeated requests to the Telecoms Ministry to provide the Finance Ministry with a detailed report about the revenues designated for the municipalities, Khalil said he only received the report in July of 2014.
“The accumulated revenues for the municipalities now stand at LL673 billion from the start of 2010 to the end of March 2014,” he said.
“From 2003 to 2009, the revenues were estimated at LL685 billion. This amount was apparently transferred as telecoms revenues to the Finance Ministry without designating it to the municipalities.”
Khalil said the Finance Ministry had no clue “what the amount was or what had happened” to the revenues that should have been transferred to the municipalities between 1993 and 2002.
He said that the amount most likely had gone to the state treasury instead, noting that the government was now indebted to municipalities due to the failures of previous ministries.
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