, 28 Sep. (EUROPA PRESS) –
The Lebanese Ministry of Finance announced this Wednesday that as of November 1 it will implement a new official exchange rate for the US dollar, adopted in 1997 due to the economic crisis.
“The progress of the economy requires unifying the exchange rate,” begins the statement from the Ministry of Economy, explaining that an exchange rate of 15,000 liras per dollar will be used instead of the current rate of 1,507. “It is a necessary action”, they have remarked from the Government.
The change, the text points out, is “a first step” towards the “gradual” unification of the exchange rate, which was agreed between the Ministry of Finance and the Central Bank of Lebanon, reports the newspaper ‘L’Orient le Jour’.
The Lebanese pound, or lira, has lost about 95 percent of its value since Lebanon plummeted nearly four years ago in what is already its worst economic crisis since the end of the civil war in 1990.
Although it moves between various exchange rates in the market, in the parallel it is quoted at 38,000 for each US dollar. The unification of the many exchange rates that exist in the country is one of the conditions imposed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to receive a new economic aid package.
Poverty in Lebanon has increased dramatically over the past year and now affects around 74 percent of the population, according to the United Nations.
