Justice Ministry Official Reportedly Passes Bar Exam He Was Supposed to Oversee

Rabat – Results of the recent controversial bar exam featured the name of a justice ministry official who was allegedly part of the committee tasked with administering the exam.

According to converging reports, Moulay Said Charfi, Director of the department of Equipment and Property Management at the ministry of justice, featured on the list of candidates who passed the national bar examination. The act constitutes a “clear case of conflict of interest,” reports said.

The news added fuel to the already mounting wave of anger that had followed the announcement of the list of candidates who passed the bar exam.

The list posted and widely shared online shows a high concentration of individuals bearing the same family names of affluent Moroccan families, including names of famous lawyers such as the surname Ouahbi, the name of the current justice minister.

Candidates took to social media to share their anger and frustration at the exam results, claiming that the list is a clear sign of “nepotism” and accusing the justice minister of favoritism.

Responding to the allegations, Moulay Said Al-Sharafi said, in a statement to local media, that he was not a member of the supervisory committee. Instead, the official stressed that he “had directed a request to the Minister of Justice to relieve him of said duties so that he could pass the exam.”

Following the widespread backlash over the results of the bar exam, Morocco’s Justice Minister Abdellatif Ouahbi attempted to dismiss the allegations. But his efforts only resulted in triggering a new wave of uproar.

In a statement to the media on Monday, Ouahbi said that those with similar names that passed the exam “are also citizens” He went on to add: “How many of them passed the exams? 60 or 70 out of 2,000 people who made it?”

In addition to shrugging the nepotism suspicions as unfounded, Ouahbi added that the allegations do not deserve a proper criminal investigation. “This is not a crime for me to open an investigation. I trust the committee. Should I open an investigation just because someone sitting in a cafe asked me to?” he said.

The exam was “corrected by machines and not people,” he argued, adding: “Do they want to publish the list of those who failed, passed, and the grades with names and numbers? Do they want to see the machines that corrected the exams?”

The statement came at a time when many had been calling for an independent investigation into the allegations of nepotism and favoritism.

Ouahbi’s provocative statement reached a culminating point when he was asked to comment on whether his son had also passed the exam. “My son has two bachelor’s degrees from Montreal… His father is rich and paid for his education abroad,” the minister said angrily, in a statement that was widely considered as denigrating Morocco’s national higher education system.

In the wake of the backlash, the minister responded to the criticism by saying that he “apologizes” should his words “have been misinterpreted.”

In an interview with the channel SNRTNews, the minister, who is also the Secretary General of Morocco’s ruling Modernity and Authenticity Party (PAM), said he felt “provoked” by the question about his son. “I felt provoked when I said my son has two degrees. Indeed, he has two: one from Canada and a second from Morocco. He studied in Morocco with Moroccan children. He was educated by a Moroccan university, like me,” he said.

“If some journalists manipulated or edited videos to manipulate what I have said, those who listen should be reasonable,” the minister added. “I apologize to the Moroccan university and to the professors who taught me.”