Morocco mulls partly privatizing state airline

Morocco is looking at a plan to open up part of the capital of the state owned airline, Royal Air Morocco, to private investors to help upgrade the carrier, the official news agency MAP said yesterday.

The Moroccan transport minister quoted Americans as saying that the airline's 27 plane fleet was well short of the capability to compete in an increasingly liberalized world of air transport. Royal Air Morocco made a profit of about 140 million Durhams ($14.8 million) in 1996, according to MAP.

In Tunis, Tunisian president Zinel Aabidne Ben Ali said his government wanted to speed up privatization.

Ben Ali reiterated his government’s long standing privatization policy, saying that strategic firms supplying public service were to remain pubic, while those dubbed non-strategic and those in sectors where there is competition were to be privatized.