After the Tangier Court of Appeals sentenced eight individuals on Wednesday in the sex crime case involving French national Jacques Bouthier, lawyers representing the victims said they plan to appeal the verdict and seek tougher sentences for the defendants.
The Tangier court sentenced eight associates of Bouthier, the former chief executive of French insurance brokerage firm “Assu 2000,” to prison terms ranging from six months to ten years for human trafficking, sexual harassment, inciting debauchery, and misprision of a felony. These rulings followed complaints filed in 2022 by a number of the company’s former employees.
The defendants, who include six Moroccan nationals (two of whom are women) and two French nationals, were also fined amounts ranging from 1,000 to 100,000 MAD ($100 – $10,000).
Aïcha Guellaa, Director of the Moroccan Association of Victims’ Rights (AMDV) and the lawyer for the victims, expressed satisfaction that “the court had recognized the commission of human trafficking crimes not only against the named victims but also others who had refrained from filing complaints due to social and cultural concerns.”
However, Guellaa criticized the amount of the fines. “While it is a positive thing to have applied human trafficking laws in this case,” she said, “it is unfortunate that the fines do not adequately compensate for the harm inflicted on the victims. These acts are considered serious crimes with severe economic, social, and psychological consequences. Therefore, reparations should be commensurate with the damage suffered.”
Although compensation of any amount can never fully repair the harm to the victims, she said that the court should at least have ordered compensation to be paid for “the costs of psychological treatment and to improve the victims’ social conditions” which she asserted have been “significantly impacted by the sexual assaults and loss of employment.”
Guellaa found it “perplexing” that the court had awarded 100,000 MAD to each complainant and to the state treasury. She argued that the result is “illogical and indicates that the verdict did not fully uphold the rights of the victims.”
In 2023, Moroccan authorities requested a rogatory commission be permitted to interrogate Bouthier in France, who had also been charged there among other things with human trafficking and rape of a minor. After ten months in custody there, French authorities had released Bouthier on bond in March 2023 for medical and mental health reasons, subject to judicial supervision.
The crimes precipitating the June 2022 complaints in the Moroccan case occurred between 2016 and 2022 at several Moroccan branches of the massive French network of insurance brokers while Jacques Bouthier was still CEO. The Attorney General of the Tangier Appeals Court initially issued an arrest warrant against Bouthier, who then “fled to France,” according to Abdelfattah Zahrach, a member of AMDV.