Morocco Cracks Down on Illegal Currency Flows at Major Airports

Based on precise information from reports received indicating that certain flows exceeded legal tourist allocations and came from illicit activities, particularly drug trafficking and other crimes, as well as data provided by its monitoring and follow-up cell, the Foreign Exchange Office has launched an inspection campaign targeting the approved manual exchange points and counters (Manual Exchange) located at the airports of Casablanca and Marrakech-Menara. This campaign aims to verify the compliance of these spaces with the legal regulations on exchange as well as the preventive measures related to the fight against money laundering and the financing of terrorism. The control services of the Foreign Exchange Office are seeking to verify any exchange operations infiltrating the black market and suspicious activities carried out by intermediaries in the airport environment, but also to assess the extent of foreign exchange flows diverted to the black market and to verify their possible use in money laundering operations inside and outside Morocco.

These services have learned that the surroundings of the airports have become a market for the illegal trade in foreign currencies, where merchants have recruited carriers, employees of car rental companies and taxi drivers in order to divert arriving passengers from the approved exchange points towards spaces escaping legal control, by offering them more attractive exchange rates than those displayed on the panels of the official points. The controllers thus examined the origin of the amounts intended for exchange. The agents of the Foreign Exchange Office also benefited from the collaboration of their counterparts from the Customs and Indirect Taxes Administration on cases involved in currency smuggling through airports, which are the subject of ongoing investigations, reports Hespress.

In one year, 353 investigations were carried out by the control services of the Foreign Exchange Office with operators from various economic sectors. Similarly, 246 investigations were conducted as part of the supervision of companies from various sectors (trade and industry, agri-food, textiles, services, information and communication technologies, etc.) In total, 54 other investigations concerned the control of manual exchange companies, while 53 others focused on their compliance with national regulations on combating money laundering and the financing of terrorism. The results of the latest inspection show that 281 foreign exchange companies comply with the regulations.
The Foreign Exchange Office intends to continue to intensify the supervision of manual exchange companies by directing its efforts towards the examination and monitoring of the files of these companies, in order to ensure their compliance with measures to combat money laundering and the financing of terrorism.