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In April, when civil unrest over rampant corruption and a faltering economy forced Algeria’s then-President Abdelaziz Bouteflika to resign after two decades in office, government officials promised to strengthen the country’s primary law against graft and fulfill their earlier pledge to establish a new office to prosecute financial crime.

Now in its eighth month, the campaign from which those pledges originated has seen the former head of Algeria’s central bank questioned, its former finance minister accused of embezzlement and more than a dozen other senior officials and industry executives arrested, including captains of the nation’s food, construction and telecom sectors, the head of its largest private lender and two former heads of government.

But no further details on the new prosecutor and overhaul of the 2006 law against corruption have emerged, not even in a press release, making an accurate assessment of the government’s priorities difficult and fueling skepticism that the campaign is not only temporary, but little more than a paper tiger.

“I’ve seen so many regulations issued but never implemented,” a senior banker with extensive experience in Algeria told ACAMS moneylaundering.com on condition of anonymity. “In this country, there is the law and the spirit of the law, and then there is its application.”

Algeria rated noncompliant or only partially compliant with 38 of the Financial Action Task Force’s previous 49 standards in 2010, and three years later landed on the group’s list of jurisdictions with strategic deficiencies after failing to address those issues.

FATF removed Algeria from its so-called gray list in 2016 after the country made “significant progress” in improving its due-diligence and counterterrorist-financing rules, but the country still hovers near the bottom of Transparency International’s corruption index and the Basel Institute’s anti-money laundering rankings.

One way of identifying Algeria’s current shortcomings against financial crime is from the vantage of the EU, where in the past year authorities have assisted Algeria’s anti-corruption unit, ONPLC, in developing AML guidance, and trained Algeria’s financial intelligence unit, or CTRF, on reviewing suspicious transactions.

But illicit finance is only one of many problems in the North African nation, which faces a more immediate, even existential, threat from its thriving black market, youth unemployment of more than 25 percent and decline in revenue from oil—by far its largest export and the source of most of its domestic budget.

Algeria’s central bank seemed to confirm the secondary status of AML and anti-financial crime in general in guidance last year, instructing lenders that they could accept unlimited amounts of foreign currency from depositors who meet the most basic compliance expectation of simply identifying themselves.

The central bank partially reversed that policy on Oct. 27, ordering lenders to obtain customs declarations from foreign clients before accepting their deposits, but exempting Algerian residents from that more stringent requirement.

Said Belguidoum of the Institute of Research and Study on Arab and Muslim Worlds in Marseille, France, said the current anti-corruption campaign is more “a rearrangement of interest groups” than a genuine effort to uproot criminality from Algeria’s government and economy.

“Everything goes through corruption, from the most banal administrative act to major public contracts,” Belguidoum said. “As a result, the government has no legitimacy to conduct a clean hand operation—only the rule of law would make that possible.”

Where to begin?

Adopted in 2006, Algeria’s primary law against corruption set a three-year statute of limitations of only three years, allowing thousands of cases to be dismissed without further action, said Halim Feddal, who heads ALNC, an anti-graft advocacy group based in Algiers.

Whistleblower protections have never been promulgated, said Feddal, and a requirement that Algerian officials accurately declare their total assets or risk criminal prosecution lacks a built-in mechanism for flagging omissions and fabrications.

ONPLC, a government anti-corruption unit, was also established in 2006 but existed only on paper until 2011, when the agency was finally staffed with personnel amid a $200 million graft scandal at state-owned oil company Sonatrach.

Fast forward to the current campaign, during which two justice ministers, several public prosecutors and the directors of ONPLC and a second anti-corruption agency, OCRC, have been removed from office without explanation.

“What is happening now is a war between ruling gangs, some of whom are prosecuted while others continue to benefit from impunity,” Feddal said. “Many people close to the chief of defense [Ahmed Gaid Salah], for example, have not been affected by this offensive even though the military sector is among the most corrupt in the world.”

Any anti-graft strategy must ensure the independence of the judiciary and the Bank of Algeria to succeed, said Feddal, and both of those elements would require a new constitution.

In such a context, promising a national financial-crime prosecutor and improved anti-corruption law appears akin to putting the cart before the horse, but time is running out.

FATF’s next evaluation of Algeria is only two years away and for the first time will measure the efficacy of the country’s laws and regulations against financial crime.

Contact Gabriel Vedrenne at gvedrenne@acams.org