A court in northern Morocco has delivered a stiff verdict in a property fraud case that has drawn attention to the murky world of land registration disputes in Tangier. The criminal chamber of the Tangier Court of Appeal sentenced Ahmed Azzakaf, deputy head of the Charaf-Mghogha district council, to seven years in prison for forging official and property documents and using them in real estate transactions.
Handing down its ruling in the early hours of Friday, the court also ordered the destruction of the falsified papers and compensation for the civil plaintiff. The case had expanded well beyond its original scope, eventually drawing in charges of forming a criminal network alongside the forgery counts, all tied to land registration procedures in the city.
The affair began with a complaint filed by a Moroccan expatriate who accused the local official of attempting to seize a plot of land in Tangier’s Hararach district. Investigators who followed up on that complaint soon found themselves examining a wider trail of paperwork, raising doubts about the authenticity of administrative certificates used across several separate property files in the same area.
During the trial, Azzakaf maintained that his dealings had followed proper legal channels. He attributed discrepancies found in the recorded size of certain plots to simple clerical errors made while drafting contracts, and said he had obtained one of the disputed certificates from a local authority representative.
Suspicion deepened, however, once investigators discovered that no administrative certificate for a plot exceeding five thousand square meters, in the city’s Tangier al-Baliya neighborhood, existed anywhere in the relevant registries. Additional red flags emerged over the document’s issue date, its registration number and the process by which it had supposedly been obtained.
In the end, the first-instance ruling found the elected official guilty and imposed the seven-year prison term, along with the order to destroy the forged papers and compensate the aggrieved party. The verdict adds to a string of recent rulings in which Moroccan courts have cracked down on fraudulent schemes exploiting gaps in property registration — a persistent source of friction in a real estate market where land titles can remain contested for years.
