Prevarication: a municipal president involved in a vast network of embezzlement of public money

Seventeen members of a criminal gang were arrested by the regional brigade of the judicial police in Rabat. The magistrate in charge of the investigation at the criminal chamber of the Rabat Court of Appeal responsible for financial crimes decided, late in the night from Thursday to Friday, to prosecute the defendants in a state of provisional release, after having ordered their placement under judicial supervision.

«Among the members of this criminal gang are the president of a commune in the province of Tetouan, civil servants working in local authorities in the same province, including a department head, businessmen, entrepreneurs, intermediaries, artisans and the unemployed», relates the daily Al Akhbar in its weekend edition of November 23 and 24.

These seventeen defendants, who were referred on Thursday to the competent public prosecutor's office, would be prosecuted for “squandering of public funds, forgery and use of forgery, complicity in the use of forgery, falsification of the stamps of several administrations and car trafficking».

The case, recalls the daily, dates back to 2015, when the competent authorities audited the administrative and financial circuits of the Tetouan vehicle registration center. The investigation revealed the involvement of certain officials in the falsification and trafficking of false documents relating to stolen and non-customs-cleared cars. Customs and ownership documents for vehicles imported through the ordinary procedure are falsified in the region.

The same daily sources report that “several vehicles registered in Tetouan were listed in Interpol databases as stolen from countries in Europe“. This is a complex tangle that justice will unravel as the investigation carried out by the magistrate responsible for investigating this case progresses.