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In December 4, 2019, lawyer Mohamed Fekhar, brought on behalf of French insurance firm AXA Assurance Maroc a debt recovery lawsuit against the Socialist Union of Popular Forces (USFP) party and its Arabic-language newspaper Al Ittigad al Ichtiraki for failing to pay insurance premiums.
The case brought against the party of current Justice Minister Mohammed Benabdelkader is only one of the thousand cases judged on December 12 of the same year. In less than 8 days, the fate of the party, led by the politician and lawyer Driss Lachgar, was decided. In one day, Judge Amina Ridouane issued her rulings regarding 1,000 debt recovery cases, without having the defense of the debtors attend the hearing, which was the first and only hearing for said cases. The 1,000 debtors were all judged without being notified about the suits brought against them in the first place.
Despite our numerous attempts to collect information on the Al Ittihad al Ichtiraki / USFP file, we were not able to determine whether AXA Assurance Maroc’s claims were genuine and if they were not time-barred. No one was able to tell us if the party and the newspaper were planning to appeal against the decision.
The newspaper's editor Abdelhamid Jmahri said that he is not aware of the trial nor the case brought against the Al Itihad al Ichtiraki. However, Yabiladi understands that the newspaper had been notified of the judgment. As for USFP, the head of the party Driss Lachgar also confirmed that he doesn’t know about the lawsuit brought by AXA Assurance. «I did not know. Thank you for letting me know about this», he told Yabiladi.
Contacted by Yabiladi, the Minister of Justice, Mohammed Benabdelkader said that «[he] has no comments to make on court cases».
The tip of the iceberg
This file bearing the number 2019/1203/24202 borders on the absurd. It unveils the distressing in which the group of lawyers and judges of the sixth chamber of commercial affairs at the Casablanca Court of First Instance operated.
It is not difficult to imagine that if lawyer Mohamed Fekhar and judge Amina Ridouane had known that on December 12, 2019, the thousand cases they handled included one brought against the party of the Minister of Justice and his newspaper, they would have treated it with more respect, that is to say by following the procedure supposed to be applied to all debtors.
This case also involves the Moroccan subsidiary of the AXA group. Indeed, the company, present in Morocco for more than 125 years has seen hundreds of judgments rendered in accordance with its requests. Could the company's director of litigation ignore the fact that hundreds of recovery cases judged at the first hearing, a week after being filed in court, were a humanly impossible task ? Wasn't she surprised when the company’s lawyer asked for a few hundred dirhams to work on each case ?
Since the system is now bare, there is still time for USFP party and Al Ittihad al Ichtiraki to appeal. A socialist cannot bow down before the privatization of justice.
