The Lebanese Center for Human Rights (CLDH) is a local non-profit, non-partisan Lebanese human rights organization in Beirut that was established by the Franco-Lebanese Movement SOLIDA (Support for Lebanese Detained Arbitrarily) in 2006. SOLIDA has been active since 1996 in the struggle against arbitrary detention, enforced disappearance and the impunity of those perpetrating gross human violations.

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September 28, 2010

Daily Star - Magistrate demands 7 years of hard labor for Ezzedine - September 28, 2010

By The Daily Star



BEIRUT: Mount Lebanon First Investigative Magistrate Jean Ferneyni demanded seven years of hard labor for a businessman whom media reports said had close ties to Hizbullah.
Issuing his indictment in the case, Ferneyni charged businessman Salah Ezzeddine with embezzlement as well as fraudulent bankruptcy.
According to the indictment filed by Ferneyni, Ezzeddine “claimed that he had incurred losses of some $90 million without confirming these losses with documents and legal means, and therefore his actions fell under fraudulent bankruptcy along with embezzling people’s money and squandering it deceptively.”
He was also accused of “deceiving people through convincing them that he was making enormous financial gains, which enabled him to embezzle their money and squander it under the pretext of investing it in profitable commercial projects.”
Youssef Faour was given the same sentence “for assisting Ezzeddine through making people trust the latter via illegal means and preparing for the crime of fraudulent bankruptcy” committed by Ezzeddine.
Ferneyni referred the two to Mount Lebanon criminal court for trial.
However, he exempted Anis Ahmad Qanso, Ali Jishi, The Investor Company S.A.L., Hiba Tahineh, Mohammad Bazzi and Ali Qoaik for the lack of evidence implicating them in such crimes.
Ezzeddine was apprehended around a year ago by Lebanese authorities.
The indictment, composed of 25 pages, said that Ezzeddine, whom some media outlets described as “Hizbullah’s foreign minister,” worked in trade in Lebanon and abroad through companies that he owned as well as others in which he was a stockholder.
Ezzeddine gained the trust of his clients by pretending to be a devout Muslim, organizing trips to Islamic holy sites along with pilgrimage trips, it said. 
Relying on this trust, Ezzeddine received funds from depositors, promising to invest them in profitable projects, it said.
In an effort to attract clients, Ezzedine offered interest rates that saw him paying 40 percent every 200 days, it added.
Usually, the amount of money he obtained from his clients ranged between $100,000 and $1 million, but some deposited as much as $5 million, it said.
It was discovered that Ezzedine’s initial investments were in oil resources and then in metal trade, primary materials and finally in the crude diamond trade and contracting.
The number of clients depositing with Ezzeddine ranged between 350 and 400. He relied on Faour who served as a mediator to secure clients.
The total amount of funds which Ezzeddine received from his creditors is estimated to be around $180 million.
Ezzeddine said the losses his investments had incurred in Rabat, Iran and Algeria along with the international financial crisis had badly affected his investment projects, forcing him to use the deposits of some clients to meet financial obligations for other clients.
For the same reason, he said that he gradually withdrew all his financial deposits from banks he used to deal with in Lebanon before resorting to the Lebanese judiciary.
The indictment outlined the names of some people who deposited funds with Ezzeddine.
The names included Agriculture Minister Hussein Hajj Hassan, a Hizbullah official who deposited $200,000. – The Daily Star

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