From 2020: Digitalization through CRI-Invest<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n<\/p>\n
Alongside the legal reform, a dedicated electronic platform, CRI-Invest, was progressively deployed starting in 2020. It enables investors to submit applications, track their processing online, and obtain administrative acts and authorizations without having to travel in person.<\/p>\n
This digitalization directly addressed one of the weaknesses documented by the Court of Auditors: the lack of IT interconnection between CRIs and partner administrations and the limitations of the SI-INVEST system then in place.<\/p>\n
In its formal response incorporated into the Court’s report, the supervising ministry had also committed to developing \u201can electronic portal enabling investors to track their applications\u201d and a unified information system for the business-creation one-stop shop. The rollout of CRI-Invest has at least partially fulfilled that commitment.<\/p>\n
2022\u20132025: Supervision shifts, and the CRUI gains greater authority<\/h2>\n
On November 12, 2022, the Minister of the Interior announced before Parliament the transfer of supervision over the CRIs from the Ministry of the Interior to the ministry responsible for Investment, Convergence and Public Policy Evaluation, then headed by Mohcine Jazouli, in application of Law 47-18 and in line with the National Investment Charter.<\/p>\n
The Walis retain oversight powers, including the ability to request that a rejected application be reconsidered.<\/p>\n
Law No. 22-24, definitively adopted in December 2024 and published on January 20, 2025, further strengthened the system. CRUI opinions became fully binding; tighter deadlines were introduced (20 days for the CRUI’s decision and an additional 10 days for administrative finalization, with applications transmitted by the CRI secretariat within 2 days and meetings convened 5 days in advance); CRI directors were given the authority to enter into agreements directly, subject to the governor’s oversight, for projects below MAD 250 million; the board of directors was reduced to two sessions per year, with a Secretary-General position created to support the director; and a new appeals commission dedicated to investor disputes replaced the previous appeals mechanism.<\/p>\n
2026: An implementing decree completes the reform<\/h2>\n
Decree No. 2-26-564, recently published in the Official Bulletin, amends and supplements Implementing Decree No. 2-19-67 (2019), thereby closing, to date, the regulatory cycle initiated by Law 22-24.<\/p>\n
Signed by the Head of Government and countersigned by the Ministers of the Interior, Investment and Finance, the decree formalizes the appeals commission provided for by the law: a ministerial commission chaired by the Head of Government himself and composed of the Minister of the Interior, the Minister of Finance, the Minister of Investment and the Secretary-General of the Government, with a maximum period of 45 days to rule on an appeal.<\/p>\n
A technical pre-screening commission, chaired by the Ministry of the Interior, examines applications beforehand; the secretariat of the appeals commission is also handled by that ministry.<\/p>\n
Article 4 of the decree also subjects the CRIs to the rules established by the public procurement decree of March 8, 2023 \u2014 a significant budgetary discipline requirement for public establishments that have only recently acquired financial autonomy.<\/p>\n
The decree clarifies a point that had remained unclear since the transfer of supervision in 2022: although political oversight of the CRIs now falls under the Ministry of Investment, the Wali continues to chair the CRUI at the regional level and sign investment agreements, while the Ministry of the Interior remains central to the appeals mechanism, both as a member of the appeals commission and as the authority responsible for its secretariat and the technical commission supporting it.<\/p>\n
WL Advisory Perspective<\/h2>\nA reform built through successive corrections<\/h3>\n
Three legislative reforms, one digital platform and a major implementing decree over twenty-four years are not a sign of instability. On the contrary, they demonstrate a system shaped through successive corrections to its own blind spots, under constant political pressure since the royal criticism of 2017.<\/p>\n
Each stage addressed a visible failure of the previous one. The management autonomy without legal personality introduced in 2002 encountered the absence of a common strategy and inadequate IT interconnection. The legal personality and CRUI introduced in 2019, complemented by the digitalization brought by CRI-Invest from 2020 onward, encountered non-binding opinions and procedures that remained overly centralized. Law 22-24 and its 2026 implementing decree directly address these two latter issues, finally giving the appeals procedure a concrete institutional structure.<\/p>\n
An appeals mechanism entrusted to the authority that has the power to act<\/h3>\n
In our view, maintaining the Ministry of the Interior at the heart of this appeals procedure is a sound design choice rather than an obstacle to the convergence logic initiated in 2022.<\/p>\n
An appeals mechanism is only meaningful if it leads to a decision that can actually be implemented on the ground. In practice, it is the Ministry of the Interior, through the Wali, that retains hierarchical authority over the regional and local decentralized administrations upon which the processing of an investment application depends \u2014 urban planning, land, municipal authorizations, and so forth.<\/p>\n
Entrusting the secretariat and technical pre-screening of appeals to the authority that effectively controls these administrations, rather than to a sectoral ministry without hierarchical authority at the local level, gives the appeals mechanism a genuine chance of producing results rather than becoming merely a procedural formality.<\/p>\n
Regional implementation: the text’s blind spot<\/h3>\n
What the legislation still does not explain is how the scope of each reform will translate into regional implementation capacity, which remains uneven and for which we currently have, for the most part, only official figures dating back to 2015.<\/p>\n
Our assessment, based on direct experience with similar institutional reforms, is that the most difficult part of an institutional reform is never the adoption of the law or publication of the decree. It is the ability of regional administrations to absorb new deadlines, new digital tools and new responsibilities at the same pace everywhere.<\/p>\n
This is precisely the gap we will document in the next Brief in this series, dedicated to the CRUI, followed by Brief No. 6, which will focus on benchmarking the communications of the 12 current CRIs.<\/p>\n
Access to data: an unresolved challenge<\/h3>\n
The number of applications processed, their sectoral distribution, and above all their impact on employment broken down by province, or even by municipality, are precisely the data that would allow an investor, researcher or local elected official to objectively assess the performance of a CRI rather than relying on aggregated figures dating back to 2015.<\/p>\n
Some CRIs now publish performance figures on their own websites or in occasional activity reports; others publish nothing comparable.<\/p>\n
This disparity no longer has a technical justification. Since CRI-Invest is a unified platform connecting the 12 centers, application-tracking data already exist within a single system.<\/p>\n
What is missing is simply a standardized publication mechanism: a national dashboard, updated regularly and broken down by region, province and municipality, capable of transforming an application-processing infrastructure into an infrastructure for public accountability.<\/p>\n
This is an issue that Law 22-24 and its 2026 implementing decree could have settled, but for now they leave it unresolved.<\/p>\n
What this means for you<\/h2>\n
For an investor: the legal framework governing your application today is no longer the one established in 2002, nor even the one introduced in 2019. Binding deadlines, online submission and tracking through CRI-Invest, decentralized contracting authority and, now, a clearly structured 45-day appeals procedure are changing how a project must be prepared, sequenced and, in the event of a blockage, challenged.<\/p>\n
For an institution or technical partner: the latest decree provides a concrete opportunity to assess, region by region, whether the new statutory deadlines \u2014 both at the CRUI and appeals commission levels \u2014 are actually being respected in practice, and to request the publication of updated official statistics, since the latest publicly available data still date primarily from 2015.<\/p>\n
The gap between the legal framework and actual implementation remains the number-one point of vigilance.<\/p>\n
Sources<\/h2>\n
[1]<\/strong> Letter from His Majesty King Mohammed VI addressed to the Prime Minister, January 9, 2002, concerning the decentralized management of investment. Maroc.ma.<\/p>\n[2]<\/strong> Court of Auditors of the Kingdom of Morocco, Evaluation of the Experience of the Regional Investment Centers<\/em>, report published in January 2023 (data covering the 2003\u20132015 period).<\/p>\n[3]<\/strong> Court of Auditors of the Kingdom of Morocco, Evaluation of the Experience of the Regional Investment Centers<\/em>, report published in January 2023, pp. 3, 13\u201315.<\/p>\n[4]<\/strong> Decree No. 2-15-40 of February 20, 2015, establishing the number of regions, their names and capitals, as well as the prefectures and provinces comprising them, issued pursuant to Organic Law No. 111-14 on regions.<\/p>\n[5]<\/strong> Speech by His Majesty King Mohammed VI to the Nation on the occasion of Throne Day, July 29, 2017 (full text, Maroc.ma \/ M\u00e9dias24, July 29, 2017).<\/p>\n[6]<\/strong> \u201cReform of Regional Investment Centers: Towards Strengthened and Unified Governance,\u201d Le360, and \u201cExclusive: CRIs \u2014 What the Reform Project Provides,\u201d Le360 \u2014 the government explicitly described the project as a \u201cpriority project.\u201d<\/p>\n[7]<\/strong> Regional Investment Center of Marrakech-Safi, 2020 activity report, cited by LeSiteinfo.com, \u201cMarrakech: The \u2018CRI Invest\u2019 Platform Contributed to Reducing Investment Application Processing Times,\u201d March 14, 2021; Maroc.ma portal, \u201cCRI-Invest Platform\u201d service page.<\/p>\n[8]<\/strong> Court of Auditors of the Kingdom of Morocco, Evaluation of the Experience of the Regional Investment Centers<\/em>, report published in January 2023, ministry response, p. 19.<\/p>\n[9]<\/strong> Decree No. 2-26-564 amending and supplementing Decree No. 2-19-67, Official Bulletin No. 7530, July 30, 2026.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/p>\n\n\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
From the Royal Letter of January 9, 2002 to the Latest Regulatory Reform: How Morocco Built, Corrected and Then Strengthened Its Regional Investment One-Stop Shop \u2014 and What Remains to Be Done A system born from a clear political will (2002) Les Centres R\u00e9gionaux d’Investissement (CRI) trouvent leur origine dans la lettre adress\u00e9e par Sa […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2576,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,12,23,13,22],"tags":[25,26,28,29,27],"class_list":["post-2577","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-governance","category-investment","category-investment-climate","category-private-sector","category-public-policy","tag-investment","tag-investment-climate","tag-investment-governance","tag-investment-promotion","tag-investment-public-policy"],"blocksy_meta":{"styles_descriptor":{"styles":{"desktop":"","tablet":"","mobile":""},"google_fonts":[],"version":8}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wladvisory.net\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2577","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wladvisory.net\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wladvisory.net\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wladvisory.net\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wladvisory.net\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2577"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/wladvisory.net\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2577\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2589,"href":"https:\/\/wladvisory.net\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2577\/revisions\/2589"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wladvisory.net\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2577"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wladvisory.net\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2577"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wladvisory.net\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2577"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}