Currency Scandal Rocks Morocco: Elite Businessmen and Officials Implicated in Suspicious Transactions

It all started with shortcomings observed in certain approved outlets, mainly in Casablanca, Rabat and Tangier. Two businessmen and a mayor of a suburb of Casablanca are involved in major currency collection operations, particularly in euros, through transactions carried out in approved outlets and, to a lesser extent, on the parallel market, according to sources at Hespress. These findings have prompted the controllers to coordinate their audit missions with companies and manual exchange offices with the services of the Court of Auditors by exploiting its databases on asset declarations.

The auditors have checked the documents and accounting records of the last four years in order to determine whether the companies concerned have complied with their obligations: identification of clients, collection of detailed information on the origin of the funds and justification of the operations carried out. They are mainly trying to ensure that the exchange offices comply with the prohibition on carrying out a transaction in the absence of identity verification, or when the data provided appears inaccurate. Thus, the controllers were able to detect cases where officials failed to report suspicious transactions, as the law requires, to the National Unit for the Processing of Financial Intelligence, the same sources said, specifying that these failures concern in particular files related to money laundering and terrorist financing.

The inspectors of the Foreign Exchange Office have demanded that the managers of the companies concerned provide them with the activity monitoring reports provided for by the regulations. They have also required certain exchange companies to provide documents relating to transactions dating back up to eight years. These requirements include the ability to reconstruct the transactions at any time and to transmit the required information to the competent authorities within the prescribed time limits...

For the record, 353 investigation missions were carried out in a single year by the control services of the Foreign Exchange Office. At the same time, 246 missions were carried out with companies from various sectors such as trade and industry, agri-food, textiles, services, information and communication technologies, etc.