Moroccan Authorities Probe Suspicious Real Estate Transactions in Casablanca and El Jadida

It all started with the detection by the internal control and risk management departments of two banking groups of the feeding of newly opened bank accounts in commercial branches in Casablanca and El Jadida with significant amounts through normal bank transfers from other accounts. "The amounts collected on these accounts were then used to make transfers in favor of sellers as part of real estate transactions carried out through notaries," says Hespress.

The initial investigations carried out by the control services of the Directorate General of Taxes (DGI) reveal that operations aimed at injecting large sums of cash of unknown origin into the banking circuits and using them to finance the purchase of real estate assets have been organized. The auditors even managed to identify the identity of the people who made the money transfers to the beneficiary bank account holders. They also discovered that some of them were engaged in commercial and distribution activities through limited liability companies with a single partner, while others owned inactive companies that had not filed tax returns for many years.

The average value of the transferred amounts was between 150,000 and 200,000 dirhams, it is specified. These amounts were deposited in cash in the branches where the accounts of the companies belonging to these individuals are domiciled, before the entire deposited amounts were transferred to certain bank accounts, "which was repeated for several weeks between last December and January," a period during which many taxpayers made their declarations as part of the voluntary tax regularization operation. This operation was a great success. It resulted in the declaration of a total of 125 billion DH, divided into 77 billion DH from bank declarations, and 48 billion DH from declarations registered with the Directorate General of Taxes (DGI) and made by 8,000 declarants, while the DGI had set a target of 60 billion dirhams as part of the 2024 tax amnesty.