The lights were always going to go out: inside Lebanon's electricity affair
As per Lebanese regulation, before any fuel cargo is accepted into Lebanon, it must undergo laboratory testing. And the body responsible for said testing? The Ministry of Energy.
Électricité du Liban, the state-owned electricity company, relies heavily on fuel imports as it still uses fossil fuels. Surprisingly enough, the World Bank attributes nearly half of Lebanon's public debt (around $40 billion) to the electricity sector. Despite years of massive spending, Électricité du Liban has left both the state treasury and the Lebanese people with nothing to show for it but prolonged blackouts, sometimes as long as 22 hours a day.
Back in 2019, a fuel cargo delivered by a tanker called the BALTIC was sent to the lab for analysis. The results came back and showed the fuel exceeded permitted sulfur levels and did not meet the specifications required for use in power generation. This was not an isolated incident, on the contrary: investigators later identified multiple shipments with the same deficiencies, evidence of a pattern, not a mistake. A pattern that went on for years without anyone noticing; or rather, anyone willing to notice. In July 2020, an official ruling concluded: non-compliant fuel had been entering Lebanon repeatedly, and the system had not stopped it. Lab testing, the mechanism put in place by the Ministry of Energy to avoid exactly this kind of problem, was bought off. According to testimonies and evidence from court documents, payments and gifts were made to laboratory personnel in exchange for favorable test results. The court indictment cites among others BB Energy personnel, namely Bashir al-Bassatne, CEO of Hypco (a BB Energy daughter company) and son of BB Energy chairman Walid al-Bassatne. Bashir, with the help of intermediaries, would bring expensive gifts to laboratory staff and would ask in return to temper with test results and bring them closer to the origin-country ones. The result was that fuel which should have been rejected was approved. The safeguard did not just fail. It was actively undermined.
Lebanon's fuel imports for electricity generation were governed by a state-to-state agreement between the Ministry of Energy and Algeria's national oil company, Sonatrach. On paper, this looked like a clean, government-managed arrangement. In practice, it was everything but. Private trading companies, through subcontracting arrangements, were in charge of actually sourcing, transporting and delivering fuel. Sonatrach was the face of the contract but behind the scenes, companies like BB Energy were running the operation. Because of this multi-layered structure, it was easy for responsibility to get lost: although the state appeared to be in control, the entities actually handling the fuel were private actors with hardly any oversight. Testimonies dating back to 2020 revealed the complex structure, with more than 20 actors involved and companies fraudulently designated as buyers, numerous straw men liaising between the corrupting (BB Energy, Électricité du Liban and Sonatrach) and the corrupted (lab personnel, politicians).
Who was really running the show?
BB Energy was one of the companies operating within this procurement framework: while Sonatrach held the formal contract, BB Energy was handling the operational side of fuel delivery. In 2023, prosecutors linked six tanker shipments that had exceeded sulfur limits to the company. Faris Mousa, owner of PST – the company contracted by BB Energy to “oversee” the oil shipments – would coordinate directly with Bashir al-Bassatne and George Shedyak, PST representative, regarding gift delivery to laboratory personnel.
BB Energy was not the only company implicated; other trading firms such as ZR Energy were also found to have imported substandard fuel. In fact, it was the very presence of multiple actors across the supply chain that made it difficult to trace who was ultimately accountable for what.
Evidence without consequence
Following the investigation that started in 2019, arrest warrants were issued against 17 people and yet, nobody has been arrested to this day. In addition to that, 22 defendants were set to appear before court on charges that went from bribery to forgery and professional misconduct. Here again, BB Energy or the al-Bassatne family were not among the defendants, nor were they charged with any wrongdoing. Their ties to senior Lebanese politicians such as Walid Jumblatt (who holds BB Energy group stakes) or Gebran Bassil (former Lebanese Minister of Energy who mediated on behalf of BB Energy in the past) is most likely what helped the energy firm steer clear of prosecution. Despite detailed findings, no one has been held accountable to this day. Several years passed between the initial investigation and the filing of charges. Proceedings were repeatedly disrupted. Investigating judges were even suspended. The gap between knowing what happened and acting on it is not a failure of the system, it is the system.
The bill nobody but Lebanese citizens paid
The consequences of this controversy go beyond courtrooms and legal proceedings. Fuel quality has a direct effect on how power plants perform. As a matter of fact, non-compliant fuel accelerates wear on equipment, reduces efficiency and increases operating costs. It was the case for two newly established power plants. Within two years, both sites deteriorated at a stunning pace, so much so that they had to be shut down. Said deterioration was caused by fuel procured by the Lebanese government on behalf of Électricité du Liban. Such effects are not minor, especially for a country where electricity shortages are chronic. The exact financial cost is hard to quantify; the operational damage, however, is not. Every degraded component, every lost percentage of efficiency – it all adds pressure to a system with almost no room left to absorb it.
A systemic problem without a systemic fix
The tainted fuel case is not a story about one bad shipment or one corrupt official, but rather a story about how a procurement system was deliberately structured in a way that made oversight difficult: it distributed accountability so widely that it almost disappeared, and created conditions where fraud could persist even when shields technically existed. The most important question this case raises is not what happened, the evidence on that is fairly clear. It's whether anyone in power ever wanted it to stop. So far, the answer appears to be no.
