A case of squandering public funds would hunt another, it seems, at the regional council of Guelmim-Oued Noun. Indeed, barely after closing a first file that here is a new grotesque affair. The council is accused of having spent almost a million dirhams on clothes given as gifts.
The opposition accused the regional council of having spent 95 million centimes in a market to buy clothes for guests, delegations from the region. Ibrahim Hanana, a member of the Guelmim-Oued Noun regional council, said the president of the region “paid a financial bill of 950,000 dirhams for the benefit of an entrepreneur for the purchase of a set of accoutrements”.
Hanana published, in a social media post, that “ the questions asked were: When were these gifts acquired? Who benefited from these gifts? And who is the entrepreneur who won the ? However, the call for tenders and added that the presidency responded that it allocated 30 million cents for gifts. ” We were stunned by this farce,” he added;
The regional councilor added that “ the purchase of gifts must come from personal money and not from public money“, noting that ” this incident contradicts the difficult social situation experienced by young unemployed people, in the sense that the wheel of economic and social development stopped years ago”.
Regarding the merits of the new charges against the Council Presidency, Hanana explained to MoroccoLatestNews that “ the president of the region exaggerates the transactions, since she previously allocated 3 billion for the construction of a dam in the general budget and, we were surprised that the budget was increased to 12 billion dirhams without any notification”.
In this regard, the member of the regional council confirmed that ” these violations have been included in a new complaint that we have sent to the courts to examine the financial imbalances“.
He concluded that ” the case of Sahrawi fashionable clothes is a precedent of its kind in Morocco ». MoroccoLatestNews, believing that it did not have enough information concerning this agreement, which is in addition to many other agreements, tried to obtain the opinion of Mbarka Bouaida, the president of the regional council of Guelmim-Oued-Noun, in vain.
A statement issued by the council afterwards said that this is “false information” circulating on social media, noting that ” the agreement was implemented through a contract in the amount of 959 thousand dirhams from the entity’s budget for the purchase of gifts and souvenirs“.
And the press release adds that“part of the contract has been allocated to guests and missions that the entity has received since September 2022, within the framework of the various activities and festivals organized in the different regions of the region”.
The same source went on to say that “the remaining part of the gifts acquired has been kept to cover the needs of visits and events that will be organized in the future”considering that ” the process of concluding the business related to the purchase of antiquities and gifts, like the contracts concluded by the party, was done in compliance with the legal procedures in force”.
The statement explained that these expenses, within the framework of the decree regulating public procurement, are due “the economic dynamism experienced by the region, and the influx of numerous national and foreign delegations. Therefore, the entity is called upon to fully engage in this dynamic with the expenses and costs that this imposes, it is necessary that the entity covers part of it, like what the others are doing”.
The Council concluded its statement by noting that “theImproving the economic and social conditions of the region can in no way be achieved through populist methods propagated by some, but rather by working hard and diligently and encouraging domestic and foreign investment…and that is what the entity through the workshops it oversees, but also by encouraging field visits by investors and official and diplomatic missions”.