The IMF SLA (Staff-Level Agreement) signed on April 7, 2022 with the Government of Lebanon stipulated the following pre-conditions (in addition to the institutions responsible for approving each condition, and the current status of each pre-condition):
| IMF Pre-condition | Institution Responsible for Approval | Status of Approval |
| Bank Restructuring Strategy/ Addressing Sector Losses | Cabinet + Parliament | No |
| Externally-Assisted Evaluation of 14 largest Banks | BDL | No |
| Bank Secrecy Law | Parliament | Yes but.. |
| Audit of BDL FA | BDL | N/A |
| Medium-Term Fiscal/Debt Restructuring Strategy | Cabinet | No |
| 2022 Budget | Parliament | Yes |
| Unification of Exchange Rates | Cabinet + BDL | No |
| Capital Control Law | Parliament | No |
As we can see from the table, after more than a year on the agreement, only two conditions have been satisfied, with even the bank secrecy law not being approved to the IMF’s liking.
The chances of signing and implementing an IMF-Executive Level agreement will be drastically improved if a president is elected in the near future. This will be the case especially if electing the president was part of a package deal involving various sub-deals, as the package will then have “something for everybody” and will “compensate losses in one area by gains in a different area”. That should also give more support and establish wider consensus for an IMF agreement.
Also, all the talk about an IMF program not being needed and that it will not benefit the country is a lot of “political and populist hot air”. Because what is essential, and what is important to have, is a reform and structural adjustment program, whether the IMF sponsors it or any other institutions; in other words, what is at stake is the message, not the messenger. And the obvious reasons that it is the IMF is because it is the credible and the internationally-designated institution for such matters and it has tremendous experience with these programs; in addition to the fact that its program-funding is conditional on implementation; and, more important, it is the “seal of approval” for attracting private and official capital inflows. Of course, what guarantees success of the agreement falls partially on the IMF, but mostly on the political will to implement the program which, despite its short term losses, will carry in the medium-and-long terms large benefits. Absent such political will, then no IMF or any other deal will be adopted, and consequently no hope for robust and steady economic recovery and growth.
Lastly, a reform and structural adjustment program will not only pave the way for a better recovery and growth strategy, but will also make the banking sector more viable and its restructuring process easier to undertake, besides allowing banks to re-build their capacities to pay back depositors, especially small depositors, and to finance the growth of the real economy. In other words, they are indispensable and badly-needed confidence-building measures.