Comarit failure leaves Morocco without a fleet

Genoa - The commercial court in Tangier ruled in favour of the court-ordered liquidation of Comarit, the Moroccan maritime company that inherited the business of the former Moroccan-flagged operator Comanav. It is yet another dunking for Morocco on the maritime front, despite the attempts to resuscitate the country’s national fleet. Comarit itself remained in limbo for two years after attempts were made to restructure its debt, and then in 2012 its ships were detained by an injunction from the courts in French and Spanish ports linked to Morocco. In the meantime, however, the government in Rabat also tried another way of winning back its own passengers and two times was unsuccessful in offering tenders for its five routes to and from Europe. The call was limited to companies with majority-Moroccan shareholders. Ariodante Valeri, the general manager of the Italian company Grandi Navi Veloci (GNV), explained, “as Europeans, we were not allowed to participate, but we followed both tenders closely because they affected our possible competitors. However, neither offer produced any results.” Basically, Morocco has not yet been able to create an operator that can stand up to international competition. What happened with Comanav-Comarit is a perfect example of this. The Compagnie Marocaine de Navigation (Comanav), created in 1946, was privatized in 2007. Its first buyer, CMA-CGM, quickly resold its ferry business to the Spanish company Balearia, which in turn sold it to the Moroccan company Comarit for €80 million.

Comarit was owned by the entrepreneur Abdelali Abdelmoula. But from early 2012, many of his ships were detained in the ports of Algeciras, Tarifa and Sète because of debts. Hundreds of sailors have been on board ships for months without pay. This summer the court in Tangier authorized an attempt to restructure the company’s debt, while some of the ships are beginning to be sold. The Bissat, for example, is being acquired by a new Moroccan company, Intershipping, which was just created in 2012. Meanwhile, GNV is obtaining the route that had been left open between Sète and Tangier and also the Sète-Nador route. These will supplement the route that GNV already operates between Genoa and Tangier, bringing the number of its ships sailing Morocco routes to three. The company has been trying to reduce its expenses and debts for two years, but in the end it seems it will have to give in. The police searched the company’s main office at the request of its creditors at the beginning of June. And the news of the court-ordered liquidation arrived yesterday. The company had accumulated debts estimated at between 1.5 and 2 billion dirham, or about €130-170 million. The Court ruled that the date from which non-payment of debts should be calculated is March 19, 2011. The liquidation is now casting an ever darker shadow over the fate of the hundreds of sailors that the company employed. With the failure of the two tenders, the government has now given up on its plan to create five Moroccan companies to operate the five different routes between Morocco and Europe, which would also have provided employment to Comarit’s sailors.