The health crisis, which has been added to the economic and financial crisis that has hit Algeria since 2014, could cause the disappearance of more than 40% of private companies, warns the president of an employers’ organization in a statement to the newspaper Liberté . According to him, public and private banks should support these SMEs.
In an interview with the daily Liberté, the president of the Confederation of Algerian Industrialists and Producers (Cipa), Abdelouaheb Ziani, sounded the alarm about the imminent risk of seeing nearly half of private companies go out of business because of the Covid-19 pandemic. According to him, the state through its banks must come to the aid of these SMEs, otherwise an important know-how and production building tool could permanently disappear.
“More than 40% of companies, including construction, construction materials, etc., are currently endangered”, warns Mr. Ziani. “If we lose these companies, created ten or 20 years ago, it will be difficult to replace them overnight,” he said, stressing that in the event of bankruptcy, human resources will sink “into a loss, thus slowing down the development and growth of the various sectors of activity”.
He added that currently “companies are only operating at 20% of their capacity”.
Thus, Abdelouaheb Ziani calls on the government to support “companies in the exercise of their profession”, suggesting the lifting of all bureaucratic constraints, resistance and reluctance at all levels of responsibility.
Some banks do not follow government’s instructions ?
As such, the president of Cipa informs that his organization has initiated steps with public banks in order to study the financial situation of companies affected by the crisis and to try to find solutions to their problems.
According to him, the Crédit populaire d’Algérie (CPA), the External Bank of Algeria (BEA) and the Bank of Agriculture and Rural Development (Badr) have committed to initiate discussions with business leaders ” in order to find the best formula that will allow them to relaunch in their niche ”.
“This is not the case for private banks, especially European, which did not see fit to help these companies during this health and economic crisis”, he laments, specifying that “there was an instruction to support companies in difficulty, but they did not take it into account ”.
Algeria, whose economy is 98% based on the export of hydrocarbons drawn mainly from the two fields of Hassi R’mel and Hassi Messaoud, has been facing an economic and financial crisis since the fall in oil prices in 2014 .
This situation has also lifted the veil on a significant decline in export volumes previously masked by the high price per barrel which had hovered around $ 100.
On Monday March 1, the President of the Republic Abdelmadjid Tebboune said in a televised interview that the country’s foreign exchange reserves hovered around $ 42 billion and $ 43 billion.
These reserves were close to 195 billion dollars at the end of 2014, according to the Bank of Algeria, before starting a downward trend leading to the melting of around 78% of the initial mattress.
