Pen Thoughts

  Nobody punished me for speaking up. They laughed. She was punished, after twenty-one years. Two lessons from the same system, and a third one it teaches everyone else. A scandal treated as a scandal In June, I watched a report about KPMG Australia and wrote a short piece about it, When the Auditors Are Not Audited . The story deserves to be told in full, because I only told half of it. KPMG, one of the four largest accounting firms in the world, audited the property group Lendlease for nearly seventy years. That work gave its auditors access to Lendlease's confidential board papers, which contained bids rival firms had submitted to win the work. In May 2024, an employee raised a complaint inside the firm. Partners, the employee said, had used those papers to chase audit contracts at other companies, including the bank Westpac and the property group Dexus. The firm investigated itself and found nothing. The whistleblower did not stop. The complaint went to the regulator, and t...

Rot and Renewal, week nine. What I concluded about organisations in January 2020, and what six years did to that conclusion. The road to Riad el Solh The uprising began on the evening of 17 October 2019, after the government announced it would tax petrol, tobacco and WhatsApp calls. I wanted to go that first night. My wife Jihane asked me not to, and I stayed home. By the second evening staying home was not possible. I apologised to her and took the car, a Jeep Liberty assigned to me by the organisation I worked for, which turned out to be the right vehicle for that road. I had never seen my own city look like that. Rubbish containers burning in the middle of the carriageway. Roadblocks every few hundred metres. The smell of fire and burnt tyres. Darkness, because the power was cut, so the only light came from whatever was alight. I drove at walking pace, bumping over rocks and shredded tyres and whatever else angry people had dragged into the road. There were people standing on b...

  At 6:06 in the evening on August 4, 2020, I was in my office, streaming a stand-up special while I worked through some financial paperwork. An unremarkable afternoon, the kind Beirut teaches you to treasure precisely because nothing is happening in it. Then the room shook. First like an earthquake. Then harder, until the walls themselves were drumming. I heard what sounded like aircraft. In Lebanon, that sound has never meant panic; we grow up hearing jets break the sound barrier over our heads, and we learn, the way you learn anything you cannot control, to keep working through it. That is what pacification actually feels like from the inside: a sound that should stop your heart, filed instead under background noise. This one did not stay background noise for long. I ran to the window and saw a white cloud rising over the port. Before I could work out what it was, I heard the real sound. The second one. I watched a shape climb into the sky that some part of me recognized be...

A fish was swimming one day in a cool pond at the high western mountains of Lebanon, happily and peacefully. A frog came along and asks the fish: "Heyy, how is the water". The fish look at the frog surprisingly and blankly, responding: "What's water"! If you live in Lebanon, you don't need wittiness to understand who's the fish and who's the frog might be. Yet it is always surprising how resistant some Lebanese on seeing clearly the true colours of our crisis; thus, are completely blind on who hold the responsibilities. It could be blindness, collusion of interests and/or a mixture of both. In any case, this never stop being a perplexing dilemma for Lebanese citizens who have freed themselves from the slavery of sectarian autocrats, or to whom have never given their knees. Even when it comes to advanced liberal forces who have fought against the tyranny of neighbours, they have fallen, as their pride did, into the cracks of the sectarian sy...

I find it really weird! On the outset of the 17th October uprising, I started a daily ritual of packing a bag and going to Riad El Soleh area. Though the first day of the uprising I was angry because what motivated people to react on unbelievable, shameless actions of the political elite, was mainly the proposition on Whatsup tax. For me, people reaction was more insulting than the proposition itself. Yet, after the fourth day of the uprising, I only got the sensation of hope and beauty in this new strange movement. I even was fearful the whole thing would end at any second. I woke up every day with an urge that took me to the screens hoping to see roads are blocked, people are in the streets shouting angerly, defying and fighting for their most basic rights. I find it weird, finally courageous and hopeful! In its seventy days anniversary, with lots of ups and downs, resistance, perseverance, and commitment, this uprising still breathing. It was reduced, however, no d...