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Written in October 2026 by Dr. Ghassan Chammas, founder of ORION Scoring & Rating, the paper argues that Lebanon's banking, currency and sovereign collapses all sit downstream of a simpler failure: outside a company's own accountant, nobody can verify what a Lebanese firm is worth, earns or owes. Credit is the pricing of verifiable information; where none exists, only relationships remain, and those did not survive the collapse of the institutions that hosted them. Foreign lenders withdrew not because they lost faith in Lebanese entrepreneurs but because they could no longer price them. Country risk explains part of the spread; opacity, which is within the sector's control, explains the rest.
The paper rejects size as an excuse. European registries make the accounts of small family firms publicly available, and those firms appear on international lenders' screens; Lebanon adopted IFRS decades ago, but audited accounts circulate privately, one bank at a time. It also assigns responsibility to business associations that have substituted forums for a disclosure programme, and to a banking system that offered corporates little beyond the overdraft and the loan, lent against collateral rather than cash flow, and treated opacity as a protective moat.
For lenders, investors and policymakers, the paper sets out a concrete programme that could change how the sector is seen within a season.
Key findings
- Any Lebanese company with three years of audited statements can already be scored against some 150,000 listed and private peers worldwide, rather than against a thin domestic peer group.
- The paper proposes three steps: score the members of an association representing four thousand companies, distribute the scores where lenders already look, and publish aggregated sector reports.
- It estimates the cost of an independent score at as little as a few tens of dollars per report.
- The Beirut Stock Exchange counted more than fifty actively traded listed companies in the 1950s and has about a dozen today, with no SME approaching it in a generation.
- More than nine in ten Lebanese companies are SMEs, served by some sixty banks competing for the same clientele with the same two products.
Summary of the paper; the full analysis is in the PDF.