Abdelouahab Benzaim: “Property Of Corrupt Businessmen Should Be Sold At Auction”

A member of the Financial and Economic Committee of the National Assembly, Abdelouahab Benzaim, proposed the sale of property of the businessmen who are involved in corruption cases in the auction in order to cover the installments of the bank loans that they illegally obtained and which they did not return to banks.

This comes at a time when banks froze the meetings of the loans study committees due to the uncertainty of the situation, and the release of significant amounts of funds in the form of loans that did not return to the bank accounts.

Benzaim told Echorouk that the easiest and closest proposal for implementation today is to sell the property of corrupt businessmen, some of whom are in prison and they did not cover the loans they borrowed from banks, through issuing a court ruling to allow the application of this proposal.

Senator Benzaim refused negotiations, as suggested by some experts, with jailed businessmen such as the former chairman of the Forum of Heads of Institutions Ali Haddad and the Kouninef brothers to give them a commutation of punishment in return for returning the stolen money.

“We know where the money is, the people who are accused of stealing it, and there is overwhelming evidence to condemn them, so there is no need to negotiate and give them new privileges,” he added.

With regard to the possibility of recovering these funds from abroad, the member of the National Assembly explained that it is not impossible or difficult, but only requires the presence of political will and the desire of the new president of the country to do so, and then passing to the second stage, by throwing the ball into the judicial authorities’ hands to open investigations with the accused and their families and relatives to dig up their property, and dispatch judicial reassignments abroad, to investigate the destination of these funds, and then comes the stage of exploiting the agreements that are concluded with these countries, to work to take advantage of the necessary facilities to recover these funds as soon as possible.

In their speeches during the campaign that will continue until the first week of December, candidates for the December 12 presidential elections promise to recover the money that was looted by the corrupts and businessmen who have been imprisoned in Algiers Harrache prison for months, but did not specify their exact whereabouts or the mechanisms they will use to retrieve the looted money.

This comes at a time when banks are stagnant due to the freezing of loans that were directed to investment since last March, and resumed very limited starting last October, only for young beneficiaries of the mechanisms of support “ANSEJ” and “CNAC”, because these banks meet only once a month, after they used to meet 4 times a month and sometimes twice a week to handle intensive businessmen’s applications.