King Mohammed VI of Morocco Trademarks His Name to Prevent Fraud

Securing the name of King Mohammed VI. This is the mission that the cabinet of Hicham Naciri, the royal palace’s lawyer, has set itself. A legal team from the Dar El-Makhzen palace would have undertaken between 2021 and the summer of 2023 a number of deposits, with the agreement of the sovereign to make his name a registered trademark, reveals the South African media News24. It is specifically about the "locking" of certain names related to the Moroccan royal family: ’Mohammed VI’, or ’Prince Moulay Hassan’, for the heir apparent, and ’Hassan II’, after his late father. These names will now be the "intellectual property" of the Dar El-Makhzen palace.

Several hundred different iterations of the names, approximations that could create confusion, would also have been filed by the sovereign’s legal team, in order to avoid imitation, which is often noticed in the sector of manufactured products without the others falling into strict "counterfeiting". The objective of this decision is to protect against "any act of fraud and usurpation of titles".

In the past, individuals have tried to usurp the name of King Mohammed VI for scam purposes in the Maghreb, but also in Europe, sub-Saharan Africa and Asia. In 2015, a person was sentenced to 5 years in prison for posing as the wife of King Mohammed VI during a telephone conversation with Moroccan boxer Mohamed Rabii, world boxing champion, in an attempted fraud.