Akhannouch's empire, visually explained

A conglomerate built on fuel

The empire’s core is petrol. Afriquia SMDC is Morocco’s largest fuel distributor, with more than 490 stations and 31.7 billion dirhams of revenue in 2024, ahead of Vivo Energy and TotalEnergies. The group’s storage arm holds roughly 60 percent of the country’s fuel-storage capacity, anchored by a 508,000 m³ terminal at Tanger Med. Afriquia Gaz, listed in Casablanca since 1999, dominates bottled gas.

That base matters because fuel in Morocco is not an ordinary market. Pump prices were state-administered until the 2015 liberalization, butane is still subsidized through the state compensation fund, and storage is strategic infrastructure the country cannot function without. Whoever leads that sector deals with the state constantly, on pricing, subsidies, stocks and tenders.

One man, two hats

When Akhannouch became head of government in October 2021, he left his executive roles, and his daughter Soukayna now presides over the group. But Morocco requires neither divestiture nor a blind trust, and there was none: Forbes continues to describe him as the group’s main owner. The Media Ownership Monitor run by Reporters Without Borders and Le Desk puts the family at 35 percent of Akwa’s capital, against roughly 41 percent for the Wakrim families; an older AMMC bond prospectus recorded 47 against 49, and about a quarter of the capital is not publicly accounted for today.

The structural point is simple: the same person heads the government that sets fuel-sector policy, chairs subsidy reform, appoints regulators and signs off on public tenders, while his family remains the reference shareholder of the sector’s biggest private player.

Moroccan consumers noticed the tension before regulators did. In April 2018 an anonymous social-media campaign called for a boycott of three brands seen as close to political power: Afriquia, Sidi Ali water and Centrale Danone. Surveys cited by the Al Jazeera Centre for Studies found most of the country aware of the campaign within two weeks. Danone, the only target that published its damage, lost around 40 percent of sales and fell into the red; Afriquia, privately held, never disclosed its own hit.

The regulatory sequel took years. The Competition Council investigated pricing in the liberalized fuel market, and in 2020 Le Desk reported that a fine of 9 percent of turnover was on the table before the case froze amid a crisis inside the council itself. In November 2023, nine distributors including Afriquia SMDC agreed to pay a combined 1.84 billion dirhams in a settlement, reported by AFP, that closed the case without an admission of wrongdoing. How much of that sum fell on Afriquia was not broken out.

The fuel case is not an isolated intersection. Several boxes on the map sit in markets where the state is the gatekeeper. Green of Africa, Akwa’s renewables joint venture with the Benjelloun family’s O Capital, was part of the consortium with EDF and Masdar that won Noor Midelt I in May 2019, an 800 MW state solar tender awarded while Akhannouch sat in government as a senior minister. The group holds 25 percent of SAPST, the master developer of the state-backed Taghazout tourism zone where its Fairmont resort stands, and a hotel joint venture with Accor’s Risma. Afriquia Gaz’s core product, subsidized butane, is priced by the state; the same government Akhannouch leads began phasing down that subsidy in 2024, a reform whose design directly touches his family’s biggest listed asset, in whichever direction it cuts.

None of this is illegal, and consortium tenders have multiple members and international partners. But each case illustrates the same governance question raised by the boycott: in markets this dependent on state decisions, who checks the decider when the decider’s family is the largest bidder, distributor or concessionaire?

The empire also owns part of its own coverage. Caractères Média, 83 percent held per the Media Ownership Monitor, publishes La Vie Éco, Femmes du Maroc and other titles whose combined weight the monitor puts at more than a quarter of Morocco’s press advertising market, with Aujourd’hui le Maroc also listed among group-linked publications. Jeune Afrique has described the broader pattern: a media landscape concentrated in the hands of powerful business interests. For a sitting head of government, owning newsrooms is a pluralism question in itself.

What the numbers can and cannot say

Almost everything above rests on the few places where this empire is forced into the open: two listed companies, one bond prospectus, a stock-exchange ticker and a competition case. The chart below shows the clearest of those windows, the net profit of Afriquia Gaz. Read it carefully: profits were flat to declining through 2023, then jumped 55 percent in 2024 on gas margins and volumes. It is one company, not the group, and a timeline is not evidence of cause and effect. What it mostly proves is how little of the whole picture is measurable at all.

Three documents would turn estimates into facts: the shareholder tables in Afriquia Gaz’s latest annual report, which would pin down the group’s exact stake in its listed companies; the bilans Groupe Aksal SA files with the trade registry, which exist for 2018, 2020 and 2021 but sit behind registry paywalls; and the Competition Council’s company-by-company breakdown of the 2023 settlement, which was never published. This page is assembled from public sources and will absorb corrections; the full dataset is in the table below.