Parliament to Discuss the Monetary Draft Law By Mid-January 2024

The Finance and Budget Committee of the National People’s Assembly is preparing, starting in the middle of next January, to discuss a draft law amending the monetary and banking law for the second time in a row (waiting for its passage to the Council of Ministers), after Parliament approved the version of the new monetary and banking law last May, amending the legislative text which has not changed since 1990, as this will be the second review of its kind in less than a year.

The head of the Finance and Budget Committee in the lower chamber of Parliament, Saad Beghija, confirmed -in a statement to Echorouk- that the new draft will be a continuation of the previous law, especially since the new document will include additional and amended articles primarily related to the issue of the hard currency black market and the file of currency exchange offices and facilitating the movement of capital transfer will also be discussed.

Although Parliament previously approved the banking monetary law during the first semester of the current year, the second version of it, Beghija added, will address many points and files that are still pending and arouse controversy, especially since Algeria is counting on the new draft to encourage foreign investments.

The second discussion of the text of the preliminary draft of the Monetary and Banking Law also coincides with the opening of the capital of public banks and the inauguration of branches of Algerian banks abroad, which aims to encourage the influx of large capital needed by the banks and the investment environment in Algeria.

The Finance Committee, according to its chairman, will be faced with the challenge of discussing many new draft laws starting next year, most notably the draft law amending the monetary banking law (it is still a preliminary draft at the government level at present), as well as the new insurance law and other texts.

The first version of the new monetary and banking law approved this year by Parliament included the texts, which were officially issued in the Official Gazette last May, and several important measures, including licensing the opening of exchange offices and accrediting specialized Islamic and digital banks, creating the Algerian digital dinar for the first time, and making its issuance exclusively to the Bank of Algeria, dedicating payment by written means to recover parallel market funds, in addition to creating the Financial Stability Committee and entrusting it with macroprudential monitoring and crisis management at the bank level.

Another important measure will be taken, which is the establishment of the National Payment Committee charged with preparing the draft national strategy for developing payment methods and following up on its implementation, while enabling the Bank of Algeria for the first time in case of crises, such as “Covid 19”, to advance the public treasury and resort to urgent liquidity as a last solution, as the new draft law came in response to the economic and financial transformations, in addition to the technical and technological challenges to allow openness to new investors.