The First Scandal to Hit the Mansouri Government... King Mohammed VI Dismisses Minister "Madiha Khayir"!

The Moroccan political scene was rocked by a major upheaval following the release of an urgent statement from the Royal Court announcing that King Mohammed VI had accepted the request of Prime Minister Fatima Al-Zahra Al-Mansouri to relieve Madiha Khayir, the Deputy Minister in charge of Vocational Training and Rehabilitation, pursuant to Article 47 of the Constitution. This historic decision comes less than 24 hours after the appointment of the new cabinet, marking the shortest-lived ministerial tenure in the kingdom’s history, following a wave of outrage that swept social media and the media after the revelation of the dismissed minister’s past record.

The details of the scandal date back to 2004 in the city of Beni Mellal and its surrounding areas, where the individual in question was implicated in a case of fraud and embezzlement against gold dealers using forged checks in the name of a dentist, She was arrested and placed in pretrial detention before being released on the basis of a medical certificate citing mental health issues and her father’s—a member of parliament—intervention to settle the matter financially. This swift dismissal is considered an explicit acknowledgment of a grave error in the procedures for vetting and screening (“checking”) and political vetting, reinforcing the principle of linking responsibility to accountability and upholding the ethical integrity of high-ranking state positions.