Lebanon's parliament on Monday extended a law that lifts banking secrecy regulations to facilitate a forensic audit of the country's central bank, a key condition for foreign aid that has hit a roadblock, MPs said after the session.
Such an audit is on a list of reforms that donors have demanded before helping Lebanon climb out of a financial crisis that has locked most savers out of dollar-denominated bank accounts and left four in five Lebanese poor, according to UN agencies. These reforms include steps to tackle corruption, a root cause of the meltdown that has crashed the currency and triggered a sovereign default.
