Lebanon’s prime minister said he has agreed to a road map with the country’s president to rebuild links with the Gulf after a diplomatic rift that began last week.
In his first comments since Saudi Arabia and four other countries announced they were withdrawing their ambassadors from Beirut, Mr Mikati called on the man responsible for the comments that sparked the dispute, Lebanese Information Minister George Kordahi, to “take the right decision and prioritise the national interest”.
Mr Mikati stopped short of asking him to stand down and no details of the road map were provided.
“I'm relying on his sense of patriotic duty for the interests of the Lebanese both here and abroad, and to not to cause deal blow to the government,” he said.
"Decisive meetings" were planned to address the issue, the prime minister said.
He insisted that his government wanted good relationships with Saudi Arabia and other Arab governments.
Mr Mikati was speaking for the first time since the spat erupted, after a Thursday morning meeting with President Michel Aoun having returned from the Cop 26 climate summit in Glasgow.
Saudi Arabia recalled its ambassador from Beirut after comments by Lebanese Information Minister George Kordahi. Riyadh also banned all Lebanese imports to the kingdom. The UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait and Yemen also withdrew their diplomats in a significant increase of pressure on the new administration of prime minister Najib Mikati.
The crisis was further inflamed when a leaked audio recording of Lebanon's Foreign Minister Abdallah Bou Habib bluntly expressing his government's powerlessness to push back against Hezbollah surfaced.
“If we sack Kordahi, what will we get from the kingdom? Nothing … they’ll ask for more,” Mr Bou Habib is heard saying in the recording.
On Sunday, Mr Kordahi said resigning was “out of the question”, despite calls for him to stand down from across the political spectrum. He doubled down on the refusal in an interview with local media shortly after Mr Mikati's comments — claiming the comments reflected an opinion made before he was appointed a minister and that they did not reflect the position of the government.
Saudi Arabia's Foreign Minister Faisal bin Farhan said that Riyadh's move was more than a knee-jerk response to Mr Kordahi's comments, claiming the move was a response to Hezbollah’s dominance of the Lebanese political system.
“We have come to the conclusion that dealing with Lebanon and its current government is not productive and not helpful,” he told CNBC.
The Gulf represents the Lebanon's number one export market and a similar ban on the import of fresh fruits and vegetables was announced by Riyadh this year, in response to repeated seizures of smuggled narcotics. That ban crippled one of the few productive export industries in Lebanon's otherwise ailing economy.
RESULT
Esperance de Tunis 1 Guadalajara 1
(Esperance won 6-5 on penalties)
Esperance: Belaili 38’
Guadalajara: Sandoval 5’
UAE'S%20YOUNG%20GUNS
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The Little Things
Directed by: John Lee Hancock
Starring: Denzel Washington, Rami Malek, Jared Leto
Four stars
Our legal columnist
Name: Yousef Al Bahar
Advocate at Al Bahar & Associate Advocates and Legal Consultants, established in 1994
Education: Mr Al Bahar was born in 1979 and graduated in 2008 from the Judicial Institute. He took after his father, who was one of the first Emirati lawyers
Red flags
- Promises of high, fixed or 'guaranteed' returns.
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- Lack of clear information, vague language, no access to audited financials.
- Overseas companies targeting investors in other jurisdictions - this can make legal recovery difficult.
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Courtesy: Carol Glynn, founder of Conscious Finance Coaching
Will the pound fall to parity with the dollar?
The idea of pound parity now seems less far-fetched as the risk grows that Britain may split away from the European Union without a deal.
Rupert Harrison, a fund manager at BlackRock, sees the risk of it falling to trade level with the dollar on a no-deal Brexit. The view echoes Morgan Stanley’s recent forecast that the currency can plunge toward $1 (Dh3.67) on such an outcome. That isn’t the majority view yet – a Bloomberg survey this month estimated the pound will slide to $1.10 should the UK exit the bloc without an agreement.
New Prime Minister Boris Johnson has repeatedly said that Britain will leave the EU on the October 31 deadline with or without an agreement, fuelling concern the nation is headed for a disorderly departure and fanning pessimism toward the pound. Sterling has fallen more than 7 per cent in the past three months, the worst performance among major developed-market currencies.
“The pound is at a much lower level now but I still think a no-deal exit would lead to significant volatility and we could be testing parity on a really bad outcome,” said Mr Harrison, who manages more than $10 billion in assets at BlackRock. “We will see this game of chicken continue through August and that’s likely negative for sterling,” he said about the deadlocked Brexit talks.
The pound fell 0.8 per cent to $1.2033 on Friday, its weakest closing level since the 1980s, after a report on the second quarter showed the UK economy shrank for the first time in six years. The data means it is likely the Bank of England will cut interest rates, according to Mizuho Bank.
The BOE said in November that the currency could fall even below $1 in an analysis on possible worst-case Brexit scenarios. Options-based calculations showed around a 6.4 per cent chance of pound-dollar parity in the next one year, markedly higher than 0.2 per cent in early March when prospects of a no-deal outcome were seemingly off the table.
Bloomberg
The specs
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Power: Combined output 920hp
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