FPM: Delay in Forming Government an Attempt to Override President of the Republic’s Powers
In an issued statement today following its periodic electronic meeting headed by Free Patriotic Movement Chief, MP Gebran Bassil, the Movement’s political body considered that “the delay in the government formation is due to the existence of a clear attempt to bypass the constitutional authority of the President of the Republic as a full partner in the cabinet formation process and as head of the country, in addition to the insistence of the Prime Minister-designate not to adopt clear and unified criteria for dealing with all the Lebanese.”
The statement referred to “the existing intention to override all national balances and return to the era of marginalization, which cannot be tolerated.”
The FPM polit-bureau also warned against “wasting the investigation into the crime of the Beirut Port explosion,” stressing “the right of the Lebanese to know the truth about who brought in the ammonium nitrate and how, who used a large part of it, and who made the decision to store it for years at the Port.”
“Besides the importance of defining the various security, administrative and functional responsibilities in terms of negligence and shortcoming, what is required is to determine the criminal responsibility for the explosion,” the statement added. “Likewise, it is not permissible to miss the opportunity for investigations to reach their conclusion because of mistakes that accumulate by those in charge of the investigation, which renders suspicions against the judicial investigator a matter that tops this file instead of there being unanimous agreement over his good role performance,” the statement underlined.
The political body then moved on to condemn, in its statement, “Al-Jadid TV Station’s persistence in attacking the Office of the Presidency of the Republic in a campaign of slander and defamation characterized by demagoguery, humiliation and violation of people’s dignity.” It deemed that “this has lost the station its credibility and professional ethics, rendering it a tool of extortion for known-unknown goals that are discovered by the public, respectively.”
“The Free Patriotic Movement, which is being targeted politically and in the media, will not hesitate to do all the necessary to show that certain media, led by Al-Jadid TV Station, are a tool for spreading lies, distorting facts, protecting corruption and preventing its fight by spreading accusations and intellectual and media chaos,” the statement emphasized.
The FPM political body also affirmed that “the door to reform is through conducting a forensic audit of the Central Bank of Lebanon’s accounts and scrutinizing all public spending since 1990, as well as knowing the fate of the Lebanese people’s deposits in banks and how to recover them,” vowing not to spare any effort to accomplish these goals.
Source: NNA
