Pencilneckal-Assad
Lord of the Baath...
appointed a new central bank chief on Tuesday, a week after the former governor was sacked amid Syria's spiraling economic crisis.
"President Assad issues decree Number 126 for the year 2021 which appoints Mohammad Issam Hazimeh as the new governor of Syria's central bank," the presidency said in a statement.
A lawyer by training, Hazimeh has served as deputy central bank governor since 2018, according to pro-government daily al-Watan.
It said he earlier held posts at the justice ministry, the Damascus Securities Exchange and the state-owned company responsible for online payments.
He replaces Hazem Karfoul who was dismissed in a decree last Tuesday after three years in the post.
Karfoul oversaw an accelerating economic crisis sparked by civil war and compounded by sanctions, the coronavirus (aka COVID19 or Chinese Plague)
...the twenty first century equivalent of bubonic plague, only instead of killing off a third of the population of Europe it kills 3.4 percent of those who notice they have it. It seems to be fond of the elderly, especially Iranian politicians and holy men...
pandemic and a financial crunch in neighboring Leb
...an Iranian colony situated on the eastern Mediterranean, conveniently adjacent to Israel. Formerly inhabited by hardy Phoenecian traders, its official language is now Arabic, with the usual unpleasant side effects. The Leb civil war, between 1975 and 1990, lasted a little over 145 years and produced 120,000 fatalities. The average length of a ceasefire was measured in seconds. The Lebs maintain a precarious sectarian balance among Shiites, Sunnis, and about a dozeen flavors of Christians. It is the home of Hezbollah, which periodically starts a war with the Zionist Entity, gets Beirut pounded to rubble, and then declares victory and has a parade. The Lebs have the curious habit of periodically murdering their heads of state or prime ministers...Al-Watan last week said he was fired because of his "shortcomings" in dealing with the crisis.
"He lacked the courage and responsibility to take technical measures to curb" the devaluation of the Syrian pound, it said, citing sources.
Hazimeh will inherit the daunting task of stabilizing the local currency which has lost more than 98 percent of its value against the dollar on the black market.
Officially valued at 1,256 to the greenback, the dollar now costs nearly 3,000 pounds on the black market.
The government last month started enforcing a series of measures to stem a further drop in the pound's value.