Kataeb chief Sami Gemayel Wednesday accused the company managing Beirut and Mount Lebanon’s waste of stealing public money and blackmailing the country to renew its own contract.
The newly elected party leader said Sukleen was using the recent garbage crisis as a way to enforce another extension of its 20 contracts, accusing it of being part of a “mafia.”
“There is a company (Sukleen) that has been making profits in the hundreds of millions of dollars over more or less 20 years on the expense of the Lebanese and the municipalities, and thus on the expense on the daily livelihood of all citizens,” said Gemayel, at the beginning of an impassioned speech.
“With utmost rudeness, after it made these huge amounts of money, this company stopped collecting garbage the moment its contract ended.”
He said stopping garbage collection was a “strategy” used by Sukleen to spread panic and convince the public that its contract should be renewed.
“They said: 'Let the Lebanese drown in garbage, what’s the problem with that? The important thing is to keep the status-quo,'” he said, in reference to Sukleen.
“This practice of extortion should have stopped long time ago,” the Kataeb cheif said, adding that the company used this strategy every time the country was about to issue a call for tenders.
