Algeria: “2500 Investment Files On Study Table”

There are 2,500 investment requests on the table of the National Agency for Investment Development and Promotion “ANDI”, awaiting receipt of the minutes of the initiation of exploitation, at a time when the National Investment Council met a short while time ago, after freezing its meetings since 2019, to update the requests as 8 files were studied, subject to an extension delivery deadlines and changing areas of activity, given the obstacles it faced during the last period.

The source of “Echorouk” said that the investment files on the table of the National Agency for the Development and Promotion of Investment “Andi”, estimated at 2,500 files, returned to the fore, including national and foreign investment requests, coinciding with the presence of the new investment law draft at the level of the General Secretariat of the Government, in waiting for it to be discussed in the Council of Ministers soon.

At the recent meeting of the National Investment Council headed by Prime Minister and Minister of Finance Aimen Benabderahmane, 8 investment files were considered, it was decided to extend their deadlines and change the areas of activity for project owners after the disruptions witnessed during the past two years, specifically since 2019, due to the freezing of the meetings of the National Investment Council, and thus the loss of the period of benefit from the exemptions for the latter.

According to the source, a number of the files of the National Investment Agency witnessed the lifting of the freeze through the intervention of the mediator of the Republic, including 80 files that were counted by “Andi” related to the failure of their owners to apply for records of entry into the exploitation, due to the absence of the electricity, water and gas network and other projects built on agricultural areas.
“The total number of files that the ban has been lifted is equivalent to 890 files”.

The source counts only 75 files under reservation today, as a result of judicial follow-up, while confirming that most investment requests, whether local or foreign, are related to the food industry, the manufacturing industry, tourism, the electrical home industry, construction and previous files for the installation of cars, filed before 2019, and which remain subject to reservation because of the absence of a conditions book that regulates and frames the activity up to now, as well as the textile industry, similar to the “Tial” textile factory with a Turkish partnership in the province of Relizane, western Algeria.

The draft investment law is expected to be passed in the coming weeks in the Council of Ministers, to re-send the suspended investments, and this project will filter through Article 35 of the list of recipients of the investment benefits.

Also at a later date, Article 18 stipulates that the response to investment files shall be made within 30 days from the date of filing the file to take advantage of the listed privileges.