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Rabat – Although online launchings have gained wide currency with entrepreneurs, Morocco has still not passed a bill that allows such a practice. But according to recent reports, online launching will soon be realizable in Moroccan business world.
Announced nearly 5 years ago, the project of modernizing entrepreneurship was only submitted to the assessment of relevant ministers late last January. The reform, which will be implemented by the Moroccan Office of Industrial and Commercial Property (OMPIC), seeks to facilitate and shorten the required procedures to launch a business in Morocco.
“Since its announcement, we were starting to despair, as this reform had been adopted everywhere else but in some few African countries. The question now is what agenda implementation will follow. But whatever that is, this [the reform] is surely going to be a step forwards in facilitating the creation of national or international SMEs and small businesses, which, discouraged by our bureaucracy, often chose the informal sector”, said a stake-holder in a Casablanca-based giant company and who, later fuming about the long time it is taking to implement the reform, said that the idea of launching a company online is nothing but “a humbug.”
The new bill, however, specifies that it will soon be possible to launch a business in just 24 hours. The bill also delegates all relevant authorities to the OMPIC which will coordinate and monitor all the required administrative steps to launch a business online. It is expected that OMPIC will alleviate the inefficiency and administrative nonchalance which prevailed in previous institutions charged with implementing the new bill.
“Although its implementation is faced with unnecessary delays, once the new bill is approved by the Government Council, Morocco will quickly become a country that is connected and responsive to industrial or commercial financing”, said an OMPIC worker.
The OMPIC informant also explained that once the bill is adopted, company’s statutes can be accessed online, which, he stressed, will put an end to the traditionally slow and inefficient requirements of old bureaucratic norms.
Creating a business will no longer take one week or 20 days, or the often financially demanding step of hiring trust companies, explained the informant before adding, quite optimistic, that: “All the online steps will allow [entrepreneurs] entry in the commercial register and very quickly launch their business.”
The implementation of the new bill is said to be expected in the second half of 2018, as still needs to be adopted by parliament and then published in the Official Bulletin.
Before then, as the OMPIC is still committed to shortening the delay for launching businesses, the current procedures are as follows: acquiring a negative certification (48h), legalization and registering the company’s statutes (1 week), registration in the commercial register (48h), publication of the launching in a in the Official Bulletin and a local newspaper, and affiliation to the CNSS (24-48h).
