Lebanon & Gulf Bank

Lebanon & Gulf Bank

Founded in 1963, Lebanon & Gulf Bank originally targeted commercial banking flows between Lebanon and the Arab Gulf states, a corridor built on remittances from the Lebanese diaspora and oil-era Gulf deposits into Beirut's historically secretive banking system. The bank's founding shareholders drew from merchant families active in Levantine regional trade. From its headquarters in Beirut, the bank maintained a network of local branches and cultivated correspondent relationships critical for import-export financing — textiles, foodstuffs, and construction materials dominated its early trade-finance portfolios. The bank's balance sheet today reflects the wreckage of Lebanon's 2019 sovereign default and subsequent currency crisis. Its asset mix is skewed toward Lebanese sovereign Eurobonds — largely written down or in default — legacy real-estate-secured loans in Beirut's collapsed property market, and a diminished pool of hard-currency placements with foreign correspondent banks. Pre-crisis, the bank engaged in structured trade finance, letters of credit for fuel and grain imports, and some limited private-banking services for depositors connected to the Gulf. Confirmed exposures include Lebanese government securities (per the Central Bank of Lebanon's balance-of-payments data, 2020) and real-estate collateral concentrated in the Beirut Central District, an area hollowed out by the 2020 port explosion and political paralysis. Headcount and current assets are opaque. The bank, once a midsized player among Lebanon's roughly 60 domestic lenders, has undergone repeated capital calls and restructuring negotiations with Banque du Liban, the central bank. No recent public filings disclose current deployment. Philanthropic or adjacent vehicle activity is not visible in available records. May 2024: Banque du Liban extended its circular permitting limited withdrawals of 'fresh dollar' deposits (per Reuters, May 2024), a facility LGB customers have been forced to rely on as legacy lira accounts remain frozen. Its structural distinction is its endurance as a Gulf-facing bank in a country whose financial system has functionally collapsed. While nearly all Lebanese banks have been cut off from international clearinghouses, LGB retains a narrow lifeline through its historical trade-finance correspondents in the Gulf. That residual network is no growth story — it is an asset of last resort for importers operating in a dollar-starved economy where nearly all transactions have migrated to cash and crypto.