Mr. Hariri was trying to rebuild Lebanon after a disastrous 15-year civil war, and Mr. Salameh set out to stabilize the currency and reel in foreign investment. The country offered high interest rates that attracted billions in deposits in Lebanese banks.
Mr. Salameh’s supporters hailed him as a skilled savior for keeping the economy stable. But ultimately, his economic strategy required ever more borrowing to pay existing creditors, and it collapsed in recent years in what some critics have called a giant Ponzi scheme.
In 2019, Lebanon entered an economic free-fall that, the World Bank said in 2021, may rank in the top three worldwide over the last 150 years, citing a “brutal” economic contraction of a magnitude “usually associated with conflicts or wars.”
Despite the calamity, Mr. Salameh until recently had not faced serious calls by Lebanese politicians to step down.
But the corruption investigations in Europe began to pose new threats to his standing. Two months after the Interpol arrest warrants were issued, the United States, with Britain and Canada, announced the sanctions on Mr. Salameh, saying he “contributed to Lebanon’s endemic corruption and perpetuated the perception that elites in Lebanon need not abide by the same rules that apply to all Lebanese people.”
The former central bank governor “used his position to place his personal financial interests and ambitions above those of the people he served, even as the economic crisis in Lebanon worsened,” the Treasury under secretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, Brian E. Nelson, said in a statement last week.
Hwaida Saad contributed reporting.
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