Moroccan Expats Face Property Rights Challenges in Real Estate Disputes

Cases of real estate dispossession are commonplace in Morocco. Last Friday, a family was evicted from their own home by the security forces in the Bourgogne district of Casablanca. Yet the house has belonged to Sara’s (a pseudonym) father-in-law, who lives in France, since 1966. He would have bought it from a Moroccan Jew, Félix Kayes, and the transaction was made before a notary.

"In 1967, Félix Kayes died. From then on, my in-laws had difficulty registering the house in the land registry, until they obtained a written order from the prefecture of the governor of Casablanca for registration in the land register, on June 27, 1973. An order that was never executed. Finally, in the late 2000s, a real estate company presented my in-laws with a so-called deed of donation in which Kayes’ heirs announced that they were donating the property to a certain Mohamed Loukni," explains Sara to Jeune Afrique.

After several years of lawsuits, the in-laws received an eviction notice in 2022 in favor of the EMDO Building company. "Legally, we’ve tried everything. Several lawyers have even turned against us," laments Sara. Me Messaoud Leghlimi, a Casablanca lawyer specializing in defending victims of real estate dispossession, admits that in most cases, the latter definitively lose their property. "Often, the property has been resold in the meantime and there, the buyer pleads good faith," he confides.

Moroccans residing abroad (MREs) seem to be the most affected by this phenomenon. Moussa Elkhal, a jurist and community activist in France, recounts his misadventure. "One day, a well-informed person tells me that he knows a French notary whose signature ended up on a fake deed in Morocco. I looked into it and made sure the case was handled by an attorney general in the kingdom. Despite the evidence and requests to cancel the deed, nothing or almost nothing has moved, despite my complaints filed in Morocco and France," he details.

And he adds: "From there, files related to dispossession began to flood the office. To try to deal with it, we created the Association for Law and Justice in Morocco (ADJM). That was 15 years ago." The ADJM has already received more than 400 files and no longer intends to take "in order to go through all those it has received," says the jurist. The scammers, "they are often businessmen, who have become rich overnight, but also civil servants, notaries, lawyers and drug traffickers. It is a sophisticated, structured and very powerful network. I call them the untouchables," declares Me Messaoud Leghlimi, regularly threatened with death.