Geagea blasts PM Diab’s cabinet policy as “catastrophic”

BEIRUT: Lebanese Forces leader Samir Geagea Thursday blasted the new Cabinet’s policy statement as catastrophic reiterating that his parliamentary bloc would not grant the government a vote of confidence.

“What we read in the first draft of the policy statement does not relate in any shape or form to what is going on in the country , However, we will be waiting for the final official version [of the policy statement] to judge it,” Geagea said during a meeting with heads of the LF’s election offices in Beirut, the Chouf mountains and the south held at the party’s headquarters in Maarab, north of Beirut.

Geagea said the funny and very sad part about the policy statement is that it did not address the underlying imbalances that are known not only to the Lebanese but to the entire world, the acute shortage of liquidity and the collapsed economy.

Meeting under President Michel Aoun at Baabda Palace, Prime Minister Hassan Diab’s 20-member Cabinet Thursday unanimously approved the government’s policy statement, which contained a rescue plan to overcome the country’s worst economic and financial crisis in decades, but the actual plan was not made public so far , only unofficial drafts were leaked to the media

Geagea said the LF’s 15-member parliamentary Strong Republic bloc’s participation in the Parliament confidence sessions, scheduled for next week, “stems from our permanent concern about preserving constitutional institutions and their orderly functions.”