Lebanese caretaker Minister of Economy and Trade Amin Salam speaks during a news conference in Beirut, Lebanon, Thursday, May 30, 2024. Salam said Lebanon’s political class as well as fuel companies and private electricity providers in Lebanon blocked an offer by gas-rich Qatar to build three renewable energy power plants to ease the crisis-hit nation’s decades-old electricity crisis. Cars pass by solar panels installed over the Beirut River, in Beirut, Lebanon, Thursday, May 30, 2024.
Qatar offered in 2023 to build three power plants with a capacity of 450 megawatts — or about 25% of the small nation’s needs — and since then, Doha didn’t receive a response from Lebanon, caretaker Economy Minister Amin Salam said. Lebanon’s political class that has been running the country since the end of 1975-90 civil war is largely blamed for the widespread corruption and mismanagement that led to the country’s worst economic crisis in its modern history. Five years after the crisis began, Lebanon’s governmentPeople currently get an average of four hours of electricity a day from the state company, which has cost state coffers more than $40 billion over the past three decades because of its chronic budget shortfalls.
“The Qatari leadership is offering to help Lebanon, so we have to respond to that offer and give results,” Salam said. Had the political leadership been serious in easing the electricity crisis, he said, they would have called for emergency government and parliamentary sessions to approve it.
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