Algeria: “Retrieval Of All State Property And Real Estate By Force Of Law”

The Public Prosecutor’s Office of the Sidi M’hamed Court has completed an inventory of all the archives that contain documentation contracts for real estate belonging to the original ownership of the Algerian state since the year 1800, as they will be used to recover all the real estate and lands of the “Baylik”(Higher Authorities) by force of law, and will also put a final end to “real estate brokers”, and this is in preparation for the entry into force of the new law on the protection of state property after its approval in both chambers of parliament in the next autumn session.
In the details, the sources of “Echorouk” revealed that the Public Prosecutor’s Office at the Sidi M’hamed Court, and in a large process through which it monitored over a period of more than 6 months, made an inventory of all the folders kept in the archives, which include the notary contracts related to state real estate since the year 1800, as it was audited scrutinized, then classified, and these folders are now fully ready for exploitation.
This major operation, carried out by the Public Prosecutor’s Office at the Sidi M’hamed Court, comes within the framework of the state’s policy and the efforts of the President of the Republic, Abdelmadjid Tebboune, to recover all the “bailek” (State) lands seized by force, on the one hand, and in preparation for the entry into force of the new law on the protection of state property, on the other.
The new law, which includes deterrent measures against all seizures of land and real estate owned by the state and the imposition of prison sentences of up to 20 years, is intended to limit indiscriminate construction and annexation of land without legal rights.
According to our sources, the new folders will be used in fact to recover all the land, real estate and property belonging to the state, which were seized by private individuals and “brokers”, or granted by concession in a random and legalized manner to businessmen involved in corruption, as in the past decades, especially during the period of the security crisis.
And because of the chaos that prevailed during that somber period, agricultural lands and building areas owned by the state were confiscated, and real estate and residential neighborhoods were built in a chaotic manner, especially as the state was preoccupied with dealing with the repercussions of the severe security crisis that the country experienced in the 1990s.
People with money and influence took advantage of the same conditions to seize neighboring real estate and spaces, some of agricultural nature, others of industrial and even tourist nature, where projects of “housing, factories, warehouses” and others are being built without legal authorization, especially in the period from 1991 to 2019.
In this context, the security services  represented by the Investigation Department of the Regional Group of the Algerian Gendarmerie have triggered high-profile scandals related to the exposure of many volumes of forgery and illegal alteration through the conversion of many state lands into private property by inserting and planting forged numbers in official documents, as well as the falsification of property contracts from the archives dating back to the colonial period, especially the years 1985, 1986, 1987 and 1988, half of which were sold at public auction and the other half was recovered by the State, and this by means of judicial rulings and decisions, as the defendants inserted spaces and numbers in these contracts under the title of “Appointment” in the file.
In this way, information that is not found in the archive contracts was added to the original owner’s ownership contract, so that they could sell these lands to the new owners on the basis that they belonged to the inheritance of their fathers or through the so-called “community”.