A Tunisian court on Tuesday jailed the country’s richest \u200cbusinessman, Marouan Mabrouk, for corruption while giving prison terms to a former Prime Minister (PM) and several other former cabinet members for their handling of the case.<\/p>\n
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Mabrouk, a son-in-law of Tunisia’s former President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, who was ousted in 2011, has been held in prison since late 2023.<\/p>\n
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Chahed, who served as PM from 2016 to 2020, is \u2060in the United States and his sentence was issued in absentia. Chahed denied any wrongdoing saying the charges were politically motivated.<\/p>\n
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Mabrouk is part of an influential family with business interests in trade, banking, communications and car dealerships. Mabrouk also controls a major supermarket chain and owns shares in BIAT Bank, French telecoms operator Orange and a biscuit company.<\/p>\n
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He is one of Ben Ali’s few relatives who did not flee Tunisia after a revolution in 2011 that toppled Ben Ali.<\/p>\n
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Mabrouk, however, has faced criticism that he received support and protection from successive governments after 2011.<\/p>\n
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Mabrouk was \u200ccharged \u2060with money laundering, stealing funds from state companies and obtaining illegal benefits from Chahed\u2019s government, while Chahed received a judgement for his government’s lifting of an asset freeze imposed on Mabrouk.<\/p>\n
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Chahed, along with the former Foreign Minister, Finance Minister, Human Rights Minister and Information and Communication Technologies Minister, were each sentenced to \u2060six years in prison and a fine of $800 million.<\/p>\n
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President Kais Saied, who seized control of the government and dissolved parliament in 2021 in a move that the opposition described as a coup, created a committee \u2060in 2022 to collect money from business owners allegedly involved in financial corruption cases, to reduce Tunisia’s budget deficit.<\/p>\n
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Saied had said that these business owners must pay and that the state \u2060would not give up what is owed to it.<\/p>\n
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He said the state would collect no less than $5 billion. However, after several years, the reconciliation committee has not announced any amounts had been received.<\/p>\n
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–Reuters–<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":15101,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"news-type":[26],"class_list":["post-27633","news","type-news","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","news-type-general_news","entry"],"acf":{"short_description":"A Tunisian court on Tuesday jailed the country's richest \u200cbusinessman, Marouan Mabrouk, for corruption","published_date":"2026-03-04 07:17:11","news_description":"A Tunisian court on Tuesday jailed the country's richest \u200cbusinessman, Marouan Mabrouk, for corruption","form_embed":"","author":"","image_caption":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/27633","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/news"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/27633\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27634,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/27633\/revisions\/27634"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15101"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27633"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"news-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news-type?post=27633"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}