International drug trafficking. This is at the heart of the case which has been the subject of speculation in the Moroccan press for over a week. Who are the protagonists? Around 20 individuals, including members of the police force, government officials, company directors, a notary and a tourism promoter. Above all though are two men attracting all the attention. One, Said Naciri, is the owner and principal financier of Wydad AC, Morocco's most successful football club. The other, Oujda-born entrepreneur Abdenbi Bioui, is one of the country's leading names in construction and real estate.
These personalities also have political responsibilities, as is often the case in Morocco, where politics and business go hand in hand. Naciri and Bioui are members of the Authenticity and Modernity Party (PAM), which participates in the government. The former has been a member of parliament since 2011. He was elected in Zagora in the south, then in Casablanca, where he will take over the reins of the prefecture in 2021. He is one of the PAM's major players in the country's economic capital. The second is a former parliamentarian. He had led the party in L'Oriental, a region in eastern Morocco, since 2015. Both, along with 18 others, were taken into custody on Friday, December 22, at Oukacha Prison.
The numerous charges brought against Naciri and Bioui range from international drug trafficking to the formation of a criminal gang, money laundering, despoliation and the falsification of official documents. All stem from a third man: El Hadj Ahmed Ben Ibrahim, known as the "Malian." Born in Kidal to a Moroccan mother, this drug trafficker has been serving a prison sentence in Morocco since 2019. It was his revelations, delivered to the judicial police and reported by the magazine Jeune Afrique that led to Naciri and Bioui being referred to the public prosecutor's office and incarcerated.
According to the "Malian," in 2010, the two elected representatives joined him in a vast cannabis trafficking operation: several dozen tons of resin produced in Morocco were sent abroad every year until Ben Ibrahim's arrest in 2015. Arrested in Mauritania in possession of a large quantity of cocaine, he was sentenced to four years in prison. According to him, his alleged accomplices then took advantage of his absence to recover his assets in Morocco, including several apartments and a villa in the upmarket California district of Casablanca.
On his release from prison in 2019, the trafficker was arrested a second time, at Casablanca airport. This time, it was a shipment of 40 tons of cannabis that led the police to him. Discovered on a highway service area in Morocco, the drugs were transported in trucks linked to one of the "Malian's" companies. When questioned, he told investigators that he no longer owned the company at the time of the events: it had been sold to Bioui, who had not changed the vehicles' registrations. The testimony of Ben Ibrahim and that of several of his right-hand men led to the Bioui's arrest, followed by Naciri's. The latter's lawyer acknowledged that "the main accused was an acquaintance who asked his client for human and personal assistance," but denied any link with the substance of the case.
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