PAM wants fuel companies to keep enough stocks to cover three months of national consumption, even as the two months required under current rules remain difficult to enforce.
Asked how the party intended to make the higher target work, Adil El Bitar, a member of PAM’s political bureau, did not hesitate over where he believed the problem lay.
“Moroccans know the answer. The head of government benefits greatly from this situation. The head of government controls 45% of the fuel market in Morocco,” he said during an appearance on Le360’s Grand Format.
El Bitar was referring to Aziz Akhannouch, whom he blamed for the failure to enforce the current stock requirement. The issue has returned to the political debate as PAM promises to raise mandatory reserves from two to three months of national consumption.
The fuel market has faced political scrutiny before. A parliamentary commission of inquiry set up in 2018 examined fuel prices and marketing conditions, including the structure of the market, operators’ margins and the impact of price liberalization on consumers.
But El Bitar’s argument was that the problem could not be solved by the energy minister alone. Leila Benali, the current minister of Energy Transition and Sustainable Development, is from PAM, but her party does not lead the government.
“We are not running the government for the minister to be able to impose a specific program on the head of government,” he said.
If PAM were to lead the next government, El Bitar said, the party would enforce the higher requirement itself.
“When we run the government, we will impose this program aimed at three months of regulatory stocks.”
He said those extra reserves would give the country more time to deal with sudden changes in international oil markets rather than immediately feeling their effects at home.
“If we had sufficient stocks, we would at least have some time to protect citizens against sudden increases in oil prices on the international market,” he said, citing the war in Ukraine and tensions in the Strait of Hormuz.
El Bitar said some petroleum products had at times been held in much smaller quantities, claiming that kerosene stocks had fallen to around 10 days of consumption.
Getting from two months to three would also require storage space, and PAM wants part of that capacity to come from the Samir refinery in Mohammedia.
“We propose opening the Samir refinery so that we can rent the storage tanks at the Mohammedia refinery,” he said.
El Bitar also argued that part of the price consumers pay for fuel is supposed to help operators increase their storage capacity. That mechanism, he said, is provided for under existing rules but has not been put into practice.
