Abdelmadjid Tebboune: separating ‘money and the state’ in Algeria

Algeria

Published on Friday, 14 July 2017 Back to articles
Abdelmadjid Tebboune: separating ‘money and the state’ in Algeria

After the Assemblée Populaire Nationale’s (APN or National Assembly) 23 June adoption of his action plan, Algeria’s Prime Minister Abdelmadjid Tebboune held a press conference during which he stressed that he was prioritising ‘the separation of money and the state’.

Without giving anything away, he said that everyone understood the problem. When asked by journalists if the previous government had been lax in dealing with some businessmen in not checking their influence, Tebboune replied by saying that that might well be the journalists’ opinion. He added, however, that he was part of the previous government and had been ‘a brother, friend and companion’ of former premier, Abdelmalek Sellal for 33 years and that he must therefore take some of the responsibility for what had been done.

Tebboune did say, however, that things progress from one government to another and implied that there would be changes. He claimed that this did not mean that his predecessor had been lax or did not do what was needed. Instead, he made it very clear ‘that wealth holders should learn to pay taxes’.

It is clear that Tebboune will seek to extract some level of taxation from those large investors that have benefited from previous tax exemptions. Again, without naming names, it is clear that the Tebboune government will be looking to the oligarchs to pay their fair share of taxes, which is something that most appear to have avoided doing in the past. ‘It is time for the state to claim its rights from a tax point of view,’ Tebboune warned.

If Tebboune does succeed, and it will herald a major change in the power of the oligarchs’ generally very corrupt relationship with the government and the whole business culture of the country.  … [article continues] …

This is an excerpt from our weekly Algeria Politics & Security publication.

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