✍️ BY: Dr. Hana Saada
Algiers – November 2025 – In what has rapidly evolved into one of Morocco’s most brazen urban scandals, the so-called “Guest Palace” of Bouskoura—mockingly renamed “the Kremlin” by exasperated residents—has exposed, once again, the profound fragility of state oversight and the entrenched symbiosis between power, impunity, and selective law enforcement in the Kingdom.
What stands today as a colossal, extravagant structure rising anomalously over agricultural land where construction is legally prohibited is not merely an architectural aberration. It is the physical embodiment of a governance failure so glaring that no amount of official rhetoric can camouflage it. The pressing question is therefore neither about the demolition order nor the overdue intervention of the authorities, but rather: How did such a monstrosity come to exist in the first place?
A building valued at nearly 160 million dirhams did not sprout overnight. It grew, floor by floor, hall by hall, under the serene gaze—or deliberate blindness—of institutions supposedly mandated to enforce Moroccan urban law. While ordinary citizens cannot erect a modest shack without attracting punitive measures, it appears those endowed with influence enjoy a parallel legal system, governed by tacit permissions and political proximity.
Originating from what was allegedly a simple authorization for a guest house and equestrian facilities, the project mushroomed into a full-scale events palace—an expansion so dramatic that it defies all claims of administrative ignorance. The owner, linked to the locally prominent Hariri family, insists he received the required permit and invested millions with the promise of creating 200 jobs. Yet even this narrative collapses under the weight of a far more compelling question: Where were the supervisory authorities as this “guest house” mutated into a gargantuan celebrations complex?
The suspension of the permit in 2022 did nothing to halt construction, which continued unabated, unbothered, and seemingly shielded. Not even the regional wali intervened—until, of course, the project became too visually and politically conspicuous to ignore. Did he require binoculars to notice it earlier? Or were the works unfolding “in plain sight” within a context of tacit complicity, only to become inconvenient once political balances shifted?
This affair is not an isolated misstep; it is a stark symptom of a systemic malaise. Moroccan urbanism, increasingly shaped by privilege rather than statute, reflects a landscape where the application of the law is elastic for the influential and merciless for the common citizen. Reports of illegal construction, “exceptional” permits, and rogue contractors enjoying institutional indulgence surface with distressing regularity.
Today, the so-called “Kremlin of Bouskoura” may be demolished, but the deeper edifice—the architecture of corruption, bureaucratic complicity, and the monarchy’s selective enforcement of legality—remains solidly intact. Unless those who facilitated this scandal are prosecuted, and unless the state ceases to rely on demolition as an easy public-relations fix while sparing the true culprits, this will not be the last scandal.
Rather, it will stand as yet another chapter in a long Moroccan saga where institutions bow to influence, legality is porous, and public trust erodes under the weight of structural dysfunction.
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