In the spring of 2022, the financial brigade showed up at the factory of an industrialist in the Damascus region. For eight hours, state agents went through the books of accounts, receipts and invoices and checked the goods. The Syrian, who requested anonymity for security reasons, considered himself in good standing with the tax authorities. However, the tax officials notified him of the irregularities and demanded the equivalent of 120,000 euros in arrears; a tidy sum for this entrepreneur whose activity is idling with the collapse of the economy in the country at war. The industrialist nevertheless paid the sum to save himself more trouble.
He had heard of the setbacks of a Syrian businessman who, shortly before, had been visited at home at night by state agents, after a search carried out in his trading company. The entrepreneur was ordered to pay the equivalent of 250,000 euros to the tax authorities. For having registered in his account books a conversion into dollars of all his transactions, the man was accused of having carried out illegal transactions in foreign currencies. Threatened with a ban on leaving the territory, he paid the sum and then left the country, leaving his business dormant.
Even the small shops of Damascus or Aleppo, no trade or industry escapes the campaign of extortion led by the regime of President Bashar Al-Assad under the cover of fiscal rigor and the fight against corruption. informal economy. “Each small store sees the tax services arrive, who go through all the papers and threaten to arrest those who want to close shop”, observes the Franco-Syrian economist Samir Aïta. This campaign was launched in 2020 with the aim of bailing out the coffers of the State and bringing the business community to heel, after a spectacular collapse of the Syrian pound in the wake of the application of the American sanctions César and the banking crisis in Lebanon, which cut off access to foreign currency in Syria. At first random, it became systematic in all sectors in the spring of 2022.
Within the business elite linked to the regime, it was accompanied by purges, following the example of Rami Makhlouf, the cousin of Bashar Al-Assad, dismissed from the telephone operator Syriatel, in favor of businessmen gravitating in the shadow of the president. Hundreds of wealthy industrialists and entrepreneurs have thus been held to ransom, threatened with a freezing of their assets or imprisonment and, for some, dispossessed of their companies, noted the expert Sinan Hatahet in a study published, in November 2021, by the European University Institute. The independent business communities which dominate the traditional production sectors (manufacturing, agri-food, textiles) and bring together merchants and entrepreneurs rooted in family and local networks, are less exposed to these purges. The tax measures and restrictions on foreign currency transactions they face, however, risk, according to Mr. Hatahet, stifling these vital sectors for employment and the economy.
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