The participants in a workshop entitled “Examining ways and means of reviving investment and creating wealth and sustainable job opportunities”, organized within the framework of the government’s meeting with the governors, worked on diagnosing the obstacles that caused the delay or halt of several development investment projects.
The participants in the workshop touched on administrative obstacles and the various “abuses” that prevented the launch of several important projects, as they attributed these forms to the absence of a clear vision of what an “effective investor” is.
This defect, according to the participants, has caused “the entry of people who are not serious in the field of investment,” as well as various violations by actual investors, such as changing their activity without licenses, trespassing on lands not designated for activity, or disrespecting building permits, and others.
On the other hand, the participants discussed the impact of administrative bureaucracy and the repeated treatment of files and licenses related to the treatment of investment files, and the extent to which they disrupt the processes of initiating production.
The problem of processing bank loans is one of the most important concerns raised by the attendees in the workshop, as they called for decentralizing the processing of files directed to banks to obtain loans.
The delay in completing concession contracts also constituted one of the problems identified by the participants in the workshop, in light of “the overlap of powers between state property, land surveying and other services, and the slow pace of litigation procedures at the level of administrative courts.”
In this regard, they called for settling the outstanding files of completed projects or those in the process of being completed by issuing a joint ministerial instruction related to the settlement of real estate, in addition to issuing an instruction allowing governors to submit the files to committees formed from the directorates concerned with the investment file.
The participants in the workshop suggested reforming some of the mechanisms that govern decisions in the economic and financial field, which according to them are still “highly centralized and fragmented at the sectorial level,” stressing the achievement of a “local level” capable of ensuring regional economic development in light of a greater degree of decentralization of decision making.
