Syria and Lebanon's paths to economic recovery
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Hello, welcome to World Business Report from the BBC World Service. My name's Ed Butler. Now on today's edition, we'll be hearing from a former finance minister of Lebanon about the fledgling efforts to restore that country's war-torn economy. Also in the show, a special BBC investigation into how so-called ticket pullers are making millions of dollars scalping tickets from top UK concerts.

And after years of liberalising its rules on cannabis sales, how Thailand may be thinking of cracking down again on legal weed. When there is a weed shop on every corner, when tourists were coming and getting high on our beaches, other countries being affected by our laws, these are negatives.

All of that to come later in the show. We're starting today, though, with the Middle East. While fighting continues in Gaza, and of course the war of words continues between Israel, the US and Iran, other parts of the region are starting to pick up the pieces after years of turmoil. None more so than Syria, where the overthrow of the country's Assad regime back in December was broadly welcomed by a population that had suffered huge economic hardship over recent years.

Yeah, there's cheers and celebratory gunfire there on the streets of Damascus. That was the day that President Assad's regime fell back in December. Since then, though, progress has been challenging. The World Bank has only just awarded Syria $150 million worth from the International Development Association to help restore its devastated electricity system.

You might say a modest, but it's a significant sum from a global finance body that has largely resisted reconstruction funding so far. So it's targeting the power grid. Just before we came on air, I spoke to Fahed Saad Kiwan. He's a local journalist who lives and works in the minority town of

of Sueda, this in the southern part of Syria. He said that since the start of the country's civil war 14 years ago, his town had been played by regular long-term power cuts. Since 2011 until now, the electricity half by half, 12-hour cutting, 12-hour come, sometimes like

cutting 18 hours and come just for hours per day so it's like normal with us because you you are a human and yeah but how do you plan how do you plan your life when you don't know yeah we we have we have battery uh

They use it for car. We use it, we charge it, and we charge light on it. As well, we have battery for our router, small battery for router. Sometimes, sometimes they give us more than 30 minutes until one hour of electricity. However, in this last month, they cut the power for two days, like three times, and

They said they want to replace the line between Sueda and Daraa. And as well, there is some criminal tried to steal this line between Sueda and Daraa. So for that, they cut the electricity maybe two or three times, I can't remember, for two days. The government is then planning $150 million or so, or at least this grant from the World Bank.

Do you think that that could make a difference? Not exactly, no. We need, I think, we need more than $2 billion for electricity in Syria. That's what the government say. But I think they can make change if the world starts to work with Syria like before the regime. If

If the market opens and people start to invest in Syria, I think this will reflect on many sectors in Syria. One of them is electricity. What difference would a regular power supply make to your city, do you think?

This will make a big difference. If they give us eight hours per day, this will be good as a start because we live in dark. However, the thing here is in the situation is very complicated because in these 12 or 13 years, a lot of people become immigrants outside of Syria and a lot of

People who have money, they become outside of Syria. So people who live here, it's just people who come from Bavaria. Right. You know, business sector was like off in Syria, especially in Sweden. Here in Sweden, we work in farming and in the mountain. We don't have this kind of factory. So we are a big village. Yeah.

Do you think that having a regular power supply would be a way of...

encouraging people to come back, come home. Yeah, but this is one of the reasons because we need safety before they get back the supply of electricity. We need safety. Safety comes first. Right. Well, tell me about that. I mean, the international donors have been wary, haven't they, of providing reconstruction money back to Syria because of the political uncertainty still, because...

There are humanitarian concerns around minorities, such as the Druze in your city. So what is the security situation like for you? And how much do you trust the new government to provide kind of multi-ethnic solutions?

Me, honestly, I don't look to it as a radical government. I think the man who started the revolution, he will understand the people's fear.

However, things become complicated between minority and the government because there are some people who try to take control for themselves only. They don't want to share with other minorities. So this is what makes a big stuckness between minority and the government. So the new government, they try to control that.

security things in Syria. However, they don't have this full control, to be honest. I think they have 30% control on the Syrian map.

The thoughts there are Fahed Saad Kiwan in the city of Sueda in Syria. Well, to neighbouring Lebanon now, where the World Bank has approved a slightly larger $250 million grant to rebuild infrastructure after the conflict between the Israeli forces and Hezbollah. The World Bank fans will help to restore essential services, they say, and the sustainable management of rubble. The bank previously estimated the cost of reconstruction could run to $11 billion today.

I'm joined now by Dr. Nasser Saidi. He's Lebanon's former finance minister. Hello, sir. Welcome to the show. First of all, it doesn't seem like an awful lot of money given what's needed, does it? No, it isn't. I mean, it's a drop in the ocean. We're talking about 250 million compared to a minimum of 11 billion as estimated by the World Bank.

But even that estimate of 11 billion is an underestimate because it's based on satellite estimates of the damage required, as well as the debris. If you look further, you need to ask, well, I need a field assessment of the debris.

of reconstruction. Once you do that, I think the estimate will be more likely something like 20 to 25 billion. So the 250 million is welcome. It's called 11 and emergency assistance projects.

It puts Lebanon back on the map, but the requirements are much more substantial. But I mean, there will be those who say Lebanon's main requirement is to sort itself out, to sort out its own government and to sort out the criminal and corrupt individuals who were taking money out of the banking system from depositors.

We know that the structural reforms, the degree of reforms, including on corruption, combating corruption, we need the political stability, we need the security stability. We know all that. But it becomes a little bit like chicken and egg.

If you don't have reconstruction, then poverty will continue, displacement will continue, and you'll have further migration of the population, which really leads to greater socioeconomic instability. So there needs to be an international effort.

I'm in favor of having a reconstruction fund at an international level to support Lebanon. And at the same time, you can help it in terms of reaching greater political as well as security stability. These things need to go together. Any sign of that happening? No.

I think there are positive moves from the Gulf countries. My bet is that the people who will help Lebanon are the countries of the Gulf, Saudi, UAE, Kuwait, Qatar and the others who have always supported Lebanon. So any funding for reconstruction, and most of it has got to come in the form of grants rather than debt, you don't have the possibility until you have deep fiscal reforms of sustaining new levels of debt.

So what you need to talk about is grants. And at the same time, you can provide military assistance, political assistance. So it has to be a comprehensive package, in my view, not just a few loans here and there, which are really a scratch. All of this happens, of course, amidst a time of great stress in the region, the fighting between Israel and Iran, and of course, the US intervention. Is that...

I mean, I suppose the question I would ask is how does this feed in to their sense of confidence? I mean, international money investment is only going to come to a region when people feel reasonably confident in its future. How confident are you that the stability will be found? If you like, there's the international desire to see stability in your part of the world to allow investment to return.

I would say two things. Number one, I think insofar as Lebanon is concerned, we now have a new president, a new government, a new prime minister who inspire confidence. And I'm

cautiously optimistic for the future. So at least internally in Lebanon, it's a big advance on what we had two years ago. So that's promising for the future. I think there's a willingness to reform that I didn't see in the past. I think that's one element. The second element, I think, is at the regional level where the axis of resistance, i.e. Iran-led,

has been basically, if not destroyed, at least degraded very substantially. That offers a possibility, particularly for the Gulf countries, to set up with the Europeans, the US and others, to help greater stability in the region. It's in everybody's interest. Dr. Nasser Saeedi, thank you very much indeed. Thank you.

Welcome to the now. It pays to discover. Learn more at discover.com slash credit card. Basically,

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Points can be redeemed for future discounts on gas or groceries. Offer ends July 15th. Restrictions apply. Offers may vary. Visit Safeway.com for more details. You're with World Business Report from the BBC World Service. Now, a BBC investigation has found that ticket touts are employing teams of people abroad to bulk buy tickets for some of the UK's biggest concerts.

Tickets can then be sold for huge profits, meaning that genuine fans risk missing out or being charged extortionate prices. We've just been speaking to Stefan Powell. He has been part of a nine-month investigation into this. I asked Stefan, first of all, about these ticket pullers who were involved in this activity.

Well, essentially, because in the UK, it's a big summer of music and sport. And we were just hearing when, especially there were people getting very excited for the reunion of massive Manchester band Oasis that was coming up this summer. They start in Cardiff next week.

And we were hearing so many horror stories, I suppose, of people buying tickets and them not getting them or buying tickets and them turning out to not exist or waiting for hours in the queue to get to the front of the queue and suddenly the tickets had vanished. We kept hearing these stories over and over. So we decided nine months ago to start looking into it. And there's a team of us, a Wales investigator, have done this work.

And one of the ways when we lifted the lid and sort of looked at the ticket touting industry and how it works, we found some really surprising things. And one of those was how ticket pullers essentially operate by having teams of people by using some clever software and multiple accounts.

So they can log in many times to try and get tickets. So they're basically able to access hundreds of tickets for a gig. So if you and I wanted to buy a ticket to see Beyonce or Oasis or Taylor Swift or whatever, if we were lucky enough to get to the front of the digital queue, you could probably buy four or five. Well, these accounts, if you've got 10 accounts open at one time, you could potentially buy 50 tickets. And if there are 10 of you doing the same thing, all of a sudden, these pullers have got

access to hundreds of tickets that they then sell back to touts. Well, that's interesting, isn't it? They're real people. I mean, I always used to think that you used to have click factories, didn't you, in the old days of the internet? But now it's bots. But not bots. These are real people around the world. Exactly, because technology has got clever to be able to sort of recognise bots. And these don't have the trademarks or the footprint of a bot. So therefore, they can circumnavigate the protections that are out there a bit better.

The ticket pullers tend to be from countries where the annual income, an average annual income is much lower. So it's places like Bangladesh and Pakistan and the Philippines. And they don't earn all that much money doing it. And they're employed by touts in the UK who then sell the tickets on for hugely inflated prices. We've seen some tickets...

for Oasis concerts, for example, going for more than £6,000, which is 40 times the face value, you know. So the touts are making the money by employing pullers in different countries. And that's just one way that they're doing this. And I spoke to a ticket puller who runs a company that does this in Pakistan. And he was saying that one tout in the UK he was working with or knew that was doing this

had made £500,000 last year from doing it and others had made millions. So it's big business. You posed as a would-be tout and you secretly recorded the Boston U of a ticket-pulling company. That's right, yeah. The man, he calls himself Ali and this is a sense of what he had to say. Like, I think we had Coldplay 300 tickets, 330, something like that. And then we had Oasis in the same week.

That we did great. For Taylor's set, we did very great. How many did you get for Taylor? 319. I know a guy that's starting. He has over 500k from the previous year, he said. And then he's doing good. And he was making 500k, Ali, in the UK? Yeah. Wow, that's a lot, isn't it?

Not a lot. I've seen guys doing millions. So that's not the only method, is it, that people are using to get their hands on large amounts of tickets? Yeah, that's right. So that is sort of one element. Another element is the digital cleavage.

Right. You know, like I say, when you try and get a gig ticket now, you're often sat in a queue and you can see that graphic slowly edging up and you sort of pray that by the time it gets you get to the front of the digital queue, there'll be tickets left. Well, we spoke to Reg Walker, who's got nearly four decades of experience working in the in the ticketing industry, and he's been gaining access to tout secret online groups online.

And then he was showing me how the touts are able to use bots in this instance, but also queue passes to skip the queue. So people don't have to wait for hours and pray that there are tickets available at the front. This is him talking me through an example from the latest Beyonce tour. And basically it says here, our success was on fire and we had over 100,000 queue passes between us all.

So the equivalent is 100,000 people all of a sudden turning up and pushing in front of you in the queue. So you've now gone from first in the queue to 100,000 and first. Yeah. This is the perfect example of how touts block genuine fans out from the ability to buy tickets. I think we've lost the ability to sell tickets to the public at face value.

So is any action happening now to crack down on this type of behaviour? Well, it's a global issue because, for example, the ticket pullers, that sort of activity would be fraudulent in the UK. But, you know, the people I was speaking to based in Pakistan and Bangladesh and other countries were saying, well, that doesn't apply to us over here sort of thing. So it does need a global approach. I think ultimately at some point is the same. We went to Ireland yesterday.

as part of the programme in Ireland, the rules are very different to here in the United Kingdom. There you can't sell a ticket for a vast majority of gigs on for a higher than the face value. But yet when we were in Ireland for a big Six Nations match, we saw tickets being sold for four or five thousand euros, but they were just being hosted in a different country. So that is a global challenge. In the UK specifically, the government have a

promised to crack down on this. They say they're going to regulate resale platforms. It was one of the things Sukhir Starmer mentioned during his election campaign here in the UK last year. They've held a consultation and are looking into changing the law to affect it. The concern from some people is that the planned changes that have been mooted so far don't go far enough. So we'll have to wait and see. But in the meantime, people are still frustrated because it means that they're being priced out or blocked out from accessing culture.

The BBC's Stefan Powell on industrialised ticket scalping, a multi-million dollar industry. Now time for the markets. Emma Wall is head of platform investments at Hargreaves Lansdowne. Hi, Emma. Shell has said it has no intention, we understand, of making an offer for rival BP. This after persistent rumours in London.

Yeah, this was a report in the Wall Street Journal, which saw actually both share prices rise on the information. But Shell has come out and said that it's not going to bid on BP. And because of the takeover law in the UK, that means that it now can't make an offer for at least six months, but categorical denial. Right. But BP remained. This is, of course, a huge oil giant and it has been, but it remains vulnerable to a takeover from someone, do you think?

Yes, they're not from Shell because of the takeover law, but certainly, and both shares have been particularly volatile over the last couple of months because of how oil prices have been rising. BP's had two strategies sort of about turns the last five years. So it's struggled to sort of make the decision on whether it's going to double down on fossil fuels, for example, or go into renewables. But there is potential there for a takeover. Amazing.

NVIDIA, it is back to being the world's most valuable company. I mean, it ebbs, it flows, doesn't it? Whoever is top dog here, but it's now back with the big chip maker, NVIDIA.

It is indeed. It's worth $3.77 trillion. To put that into some perspective, UK GDP is £3.4 trillion. So it's bigger than a number of developed countries in terms of its size. What's really interesting here is although it's gone up 24% in the last month,

that actually kind of hides what has been a very volatile year so year to date it's only up 13 still quite impressive but it just goes to show how much actually the share price fell on the back of liberation day and that expectation that you know chinese import tariffs were going to really restrict the movement of chips which are really dependent on you know sort of globalization and a global supply chain but actually now um

The CEO, Jensen Huang, even came out in May and said actually they were seriously concerned about those tariffs. But now that tariff concern has eased and actually the share price has bounced considerably. OK, well, we'll watch that. Quick thought on the Norwegian software company Visma. It has picked London for a blockbuster IPO, we are told.

Yeah, very good news for London Stock Exchange, which actually hasn't had that many kind of public offerings the last couple of years. Think about the most successful IPO in London. You're having to go back to 2011 and it's Glencore compared to the US Stock Exchange, which sees considerable success with a number of tech giants. So the idea is it'll IPO next year. And this is down in particular to the relaxation around trading in euros and dollars. Emma, thanks very much indeed.

Thailand's decision three years ago to lift almost all controls on marijuana has created a huge industry in that country, producing and selling it and making the Southeast Asian country a top destination for travellers wanting to consume it. But the rising number of often British travellers being arrested for smuggling large quantities of marijuana out of Thailand is forcing the government there to rethink. The BBC Southeast Asia correspondent Jonathan Head's been looking into this.

Bangkok Suvarnabhumi Airport, one of Asia's busiest, and I'm walking with three Thai customs officers who are on the lookout for young, probably British travellers with large, new-looking suitcases. They've had a tip-off, though today it turns out to be a false alarm.

But most days when they open the suitcases, they find them filled with marijuana, grown in Thailand but destined for the UK. Becky Wright is a spokesperson for the National Crime Agency. Since 2023, we've had a massive increase in the amount of cannabis that has been smuggled into the UK. Some of these couriers are exploited, some of them are vulnerable and they're not conserved.

not considering the life-changing consequences for something they think is a low-risk issue. So if you're transporting cannabis for somebody else to sell here, you are being exploited. At the airport, customs officers count and weigh vacuum-sealed packages of marijuana confiscated recently from an outgoing passenger. There's more than 20 kilos here. And behind them, piled up to the ceiling, are around 200 more suitcases taken in just the past month.

Most of the smugglers are wrongdoers. Panton Loy Kunnantar is a spokesman for the Thai Customs Department. He's been working with the NCA in Britain to try to deter the young smugglers who are often identified even before their flights home. But he's constrained by the fact that growing, selling and consuming marijuana is legal in Thailand with few regulations. Before checking in, we

That lack of control is evident on even a short walk through central Bangkok. The city's famously neon-lit nightscape shines even brighter with the garish green signs of thousands of marijuana dispensaries.

The smell of weed is everywhere. Even Tom Crusipon, the businessman largely responsible for getting the drug decriminalized three years ago, thinks things have gone too far. When there is a weed shop on every corner, when people are smoking as they're walking down the street, when tourists were coming and getting high on our beaches, other countries being affected by our laws with people shipping it illegally, these are negatives. You cannot have a free-for-all.

The Thai government agrees. Last month, the health minister announced that they will require a medical certificate before anyone can buy marijuana. But those who've invested in cultivating it are unhappy. Growers descended on the prime minister's office to protest measures they believe will wipe out the smaller businesses.

Ketitra Pakka is their most vocal advocate. I totally understand the government. They're probably getting yelled at during international meetings, saying like, oh yeah, all your weed is getting smuggled into our country. That is quite embarrassing and I see why this is happening. But if they just...

follow their own existing rules and enforce those rules, we would probably mitigate a lot of the issue that they have right now. So how are British backpackers getting hold of such large quantities of marijuana in Thailand? Because it shouldn't be that easy. If I wanted to go to your farm and buy marijuana,

46 kilos of marijuana. Could I just walk up and do that? In order to buy a lot of cannabis, you must have a license, said this grower. And there's a record kept of which farm supplied it and who bought it. They say it's the illegal trade supplied by unlicensed foreign growers, which is flooding the Thai market and driving down prices.

Tom Chrisopon believes that new measures will fix this. We don't want this to be an issue with our friends. We know that it's a problem, but it's something we have to work with together. Thailand is going to do its part by controlling the amount that can be bought, by controlling the quality that can be bought, and certainly will control the price. That's an optimistic scenario. Thailand's spotty enforcement record could leave the new regulations as ineffective as the existing ones.

But public sentiment here has certainly changed, and the days of Thailand's freewheeling marijuana experiment are probably numbered. The BBC's Jonathan Head, and that's your World Business Report.