The President of the Cgea Sharply Responded to Attacks by the Official Press Agency After Her Open Letter to President Tebboune. But El Mouradia Now Prefers Another Interlocutor Within the Employers.
A stumbling block between employers and the executive, the ministerial tax recovery committee has just been frozen by the head of state, Abdelmadjid Tebboune. “Taking time to review its working method”, the body will interrupt its work and the bosses already penalized will have the opportunity to lodge appeals and, in the event of proven fraud, to benefit from a timetable.
The presidency gave Kamel Moula, president of the Algerian Economic Renewal Council (CREA), the privilege of announcing, on Sunday, the lifting of this constraint, 48 hours after the audience granted El Mouradia to the CREA delegation in attendance the Prime Minister and several members of the government.
As a sign of a desire to give great publicity to the event, photos of the meeting were immediately published on the presidency website. According to the press release made public simultaneously on the Facebook page of the employers’ organization, CREA delegates complained, during the meeting, of administrative blockages that slow down the activity of companies and complicate their access to supplies, particularly inputs. A speech nuanced by unwavering support for the Head of State and his fight against corruption, and by a promise to contribute to “maintaining a positive image of the country”, including internationally.
This tone, to say the least, measured, contrasts with that of the open letter sent on September 7 to the presidency by the head of another employers’ organization, the General Confederation of Algerian Enterprises (CGEA), which pointed to a “generalized slump” and ” persecution and various pressures from different representatives of the State.
In this letter, Saida Neghza also called for the creation of a commission responsible for carrying out investigations into “the issuance of import licenses and quotas from which some benefit and not others”, a problem which led, according to her, to the price increase. The head of the CGEA finally demanded the right of businessmen to acquire real estate abroad. A subject that has earned heavy prison sentences for former businessmen and senior officials of the Bouteflika regime and on which Abdelmadjid Tebboune has been, until now, intransigent.
“Predators” and “blackmail on the State”
Felt like a frontal attack and a challenge to Tebboune’s mode of governance, Saida Neghza’s initiative quickly turned against her. Proof of this is the article, published three days later by the official agency Algérie Presse Service, accusing him of massively disseminating his correspondence on social networks, thus flouting “the practices of a letter addressed to the Presidency of the Republic”.
APS also accused the boss of the CGEA of being “the spokesperson for interests, which she is supposedly supposed to fight, of the old order, those of an is saba whose favorite sport was not the practice golf but misappropriate the people’s money”, referring to “predators” who “exercised their blackmail on the State”.
Following the publication of the article, Saida Neghza left the boss of the official APS agency an audio message which was quickly broadcast on social networks. The leader of the employers’ organization threatens the general director of APS to “destroy it if he does not withdraw the article within 24 hours.” […] I will crush you like I crushed others, she continues. I’m going to ruin your life like I ruined the life of Haddad [ex-businessman and ex-president of the Forum of Business Leaders]. You will be entitled to a worse fate than the one I reserved for Ouyahia and Sellal [two imprisoned former prime ministers]. As long as there are men in caps [reference to the army, editor’s note] in this country, I won’t be afraid of anyone,” she concludes.
In her counterattack, Saida Neghza also attacked the communications director of the presidency, Kamel Sidi Saïd, whom she suspects of being behind the APS offensive against her, as well as the Council of Algerian Economic Renewal (CREA), a competing employers’ organization, described as the “reincarnation of the FCE” of the Ali Haddad era. To support her claims, the boss of the CGEA published on Facebook old photos of the president of the FCE, Kamel Moula, smiling alongside Ali Haddad and two other former officials from the Bouteflika era, all imprisoned for corruption since.
Saida Neghza also recalls that four years ago, she refused to support the cabal orchestrated by Ali Haddad against Tebboune, and which ended up costing her her post as Prime Minister three months after her appointment. But this proximity no longer seems appropriate today, and it is the CREA that the president has chosen to announce his latest decisions concerning the demands of Algerian employers.
