After a meeting with the President of the Republic who has just arrived from Qatar, Prime Minister Najib Mikati felt that the government works but that the Council of Ministers does not. He was referring to the paralysis affecting his cabinet after the ministers of Hezbollah, the Amal movement and the Marada movement threatened to resign after Judge Tarek Bitar in charge of the investigation into the explosion in the port of Beirut had indicted several former ministers and issued an arrest warrant against one of them, namely Ali Hassan Khamil.
Najib Mikati would have thus tried to convince the President of the House Nabih Berri, of whom Ali Hassan Khalil is a close friend, to allow the presence of a minority of ministers allowing the obtaining of a necessary quorum while the country of cedars is facing several crises, financial crisis with the necessary relaunch of negotiations with the International Monetary Fund, political crisis following the Beirut port affair but also diplomatic crisis with the states of the Arabian Peninsula and in particular Saudi Arabia following the minister’s remarks of information Georges Cordahi who qualified as aggression the military operations in Yemen whereas the current cabinet was not yet formed.
A previous meeting between the President of the Republic, General Michel Aoun, the President of the Chamber Nabih Berri and the Prime Minister had nevertheless led to a possible outcome of the political crisis with the proposal presented by Nabih Berri to refer the case of port of Beirut before the high court of justice in charge of judging the former and current presidents of the republic, prime ministers and ministers or even obtaining a quorum in Parliament to decide the same thing.
However, the last appeals presented by the former ministers were all rejected by the court of cassation, complicating this deferral which could be considered as a violation, for the international community, of Lebanon’s commitments to reform its administrations and fight the ravaging corruption. especially its judiciary.
