Word: hizballah
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...able to gain people's confidence easily due to his connections with Hizballah," says Mohammad Duhaini, the mayor of Toura, another town in southern Lebanon, where he says at least 250 people invested with Ezzeddine. Says Duhaini: "Most of those who dealt with him were supporters of Hizballah [and] many people were encouraged to do business with Ezzeddine due to Hizballah's propaganda for him." Indeed, one Hizballah source told TIME that some top leaders did business with Ezzeddine. The Lebanese press has published unsubstantiated reports that his enterprise collapsed when a check he wrote to a senior Hizballah official...
...seems surprising that the leaders of an institution as sophisticated as Hizballah would fall for a simple Ponzi scheme. But the organization relies on a network of businessmen and fundraisers such as Ezzeddine, not just in southern Lebanon but also in West Africa, South America and wherever expatriate Lebanese do business. Hizballah has been trying to become financially independent from its main patron, Iran (which has its own financial problems), and earlier this year, a Hizballah official told TIME the organization is close to becoming completely self-sustaining. What effect the Ezzeddine scandal has on those plans remains...
...worst part of the scandal for Hizballah might come not in dollars and cents but in damage to its reputation for honesty, competence and integrity, which, given its status as the world's most formidable organization of guerrilla fighters, is what makes the Shi'ite political party popular not just in Lebanon but in the wider Arab world. Those traits were on display when Hizballah engineers and social-service workers fanned out immediately in the aftermath of the war with Israel in 2006 to assess damage and offer assistance to its supporters who had lost their homes and business. Months...
...since then, the organization has struggled under the burden of the massive development project. It scrapped ambitious plans to redesign the cramped urban environment of Beirut's southern suburbs, where Hizballah support is strongest and which Israel bombed most heavily. Yet Waad is still well behind schedule to meet the 2010 deadline...
...loyal rank and file, the scandal may not tarnish their faith in Hizballah. After all, it was Hizballah, not the Lebanese government, that freed southern Lebanon from Israeli occupation in 2000, and it was Hizballah that turned back Israeli tanks in 2006. But on the back of several recent setbacks - the assassination of its operations chief last year, the electoral loss at the polls in June this year, the discovery this spring that an Israeli spy ring in Lebanon had bugged Hizballah's vehicles - Hizballah has lost some of its aura of invincibility, and its supporters no longer seem...