2023-11-23 18:07:33
Nine oil companies, including the French giant TotalEnergies, will have to pay the equivalent of more than 165 million euros in fines for anti-competitive practices in the hydrocarbon distribution market in Morocco, according to an official press release published Thursday.
The Competition Council reported agreements with these nine companies which put an end to a case which caused much ink to flow in Morocco, one of the companies being owned by Prime Minister Aziz Akhannouch.
“These agreements concern the payment, as a settlement, of a total amount of 1.84 billion dirhams,” indicated the Competition Council.
The agreements also concern “a set of behavioral commitments to which these companies as well as their professional organization have subscribed in order to improve the competitive functioning of the hydrocarbon market in the future, to prevent the risks of harm to competition for the benefit consumers”, according to this source.
In 2020, the competition authority concluded an agreement between three oil companies dominating the Moroccan market – the French giant Total, Afriquia and Vivo Energy, Shell’s exclusive distributor in Morocco – and had sanctioned them financially, which had never been followed up on.
After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 which caused oil prices to soar, the affair took a more political turn since Afriquia, the leader of the hydrocarbon market in Morocco, is owned by the current leader of the government (came to power in 2021) and businessman Aziz Akhannouch.
Devoid of hydrocarbons, Morocco imports all of its needs in petroleum products. After having subsidized fuels for a long time, the country liberalized the sector in 2015, leaving importers to freely set the price of fuel at the pump.
Since then, fuel importers have considerably increased their margins. And above all, prices remained almost unchanged from one station to another, fueling criticism and suspicions of price fixing.
In 2018, a report presented to a parliamentary committee sparked controversy concerning margins at the pump – between 1.2 and 1.5 billion euros in excess profit since 2015 according to estimates.
Third distributor of petroleum products and services in the Maghreb country, TotalEnergies Marketing holds an estimated market share of 15%.
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