Profile
The man who inherited a partnership and kept it whole.
Ali Wakrim is a Moroccan businessman based in Casablanca. He chairs Afriquia Gaz, the country’s listed liquefied petroleum gas company, and is vice-chairman of Akwa Group, the holding company that grew out of the Afriquia partnership his father helped to establish in 1959.
Ali Wakrim
Background in detail
Origins
The Wakrim name enters Moroccan business history through Ali Wakrim’s father, Haj Ahmed Wakrim. In 1959 he and Ahmed Ould Hadj Akhannouch — the two men were brothers-in-law — incorporated Afriquia in Casablanca, formalising a fuel distribution business whose trading roots reached back to the 1930s. That single act created both a company and an arrangement between two families that has now lasted more than sixty years.
It is worth being precise about what was founded. Afriquia was, at the outset, a fuel marketing and distribution company in a country that was one year into independence. The petrol station networks, the storage terminals and the gas bottling plants that the name is now attached to were not inherited. They were built, in sequence, over decades.
Education
Ali Wakrim studied in France, taking a graduate degree at the Université de Pau in the country’s south-west — a region with long-standing links to the petroleum and gas industries through the Lacq field and the engineering economy that grew around it. He entered the family business after completing his studies.
The detail matters less as a credential than as a pattern. A generation of Moroccan business families sent their heirs to French universities in the decades after independence, and those graduates returned to companies that were about to face deregulation, competition and public capital markets. Ali Wakrim was one of them.
Entering the business
Public company records place Ali Wakrim at the head of Afriquia SMDC, the group’s fuel marketing company, from 1985, and in an executive role at Afriquia Gaz from 1992 — the year the group restructured and transferred its gas activities into a dedicated company. In 1993 the business was reorganised as Akwa Holding under the second generation of both families: Aziz Akhannouch and Ali Wakrim.
What followed was not a change of ownership but a change of register. Afriquia Gaz was admitted to the Casablanca Stock Exchange in April 1999, which obliged a family firm to publish audited results, submit to a regulator and answer to outside shareholders. Maghreb Oxygène, the group’s industrial and medical gases company, is also listed. Ali Wakrim has served on its board since 2000.
Current focus
On 7 November 2007 the board of Afriquia Gaz adopted Ali Wakrim’s nomination as chairman, following Aziz Akhannouch’s resignation from that chair. He has held the chairmanship since. Alongside it he serves as vice-chairman and deputy chief executive of Akwa Group, and holds chairmanships and directorships across the group’s logistics, storage, fuel and industrial companies — among them Afri Logistique, Afriquia Oil, Omnium de Stockage, Oismine Groupe, Techno Gaz and Ciment du Souss.
Akwa Group today reports revenue of roughly three billion US dollars across hydrocarbons, distribution, property, tourism, media and renewable energy, and employs more than a thousand people from its Casablanca base. In 2015 Ali Wakrim and his family appeared on Forbes’ list of Africa’s fifty richest, with a family fortune assessed at 450 million US dollars and its source given as gas.
Away from the boardroom
Ali Wakrim is married and lives in Casablanca. Beyond that, he has kept his private life private, and this site does not speculate about it. What can be said is that he has spent his career in one city, in one industry, alongside one partner family — a degree of continuity that is unusual in any market.
The Journey page sets the same material out as a chronology; Philosophy reads it for the working principles it implies.
Photographed
A speaker rather than a spokesman.
Ali Wakrim is not a public performer. He appears at industry and corporate occasions in the way chairmen of listed companies do — to open a facility, mark a result or address a gathering — and the photographic record of him is correspondingly sparse.
That reticence is itself informative. A great deal of what Akwa Group does is physical and unglamorous: tanks, terminals, tankers, bottling lines, forecourts. It is a business measured in tonnes moved and hours of continuity, not in appearances.
On sourcing
Editorial standardWhat the public record does support.
Name, nationality, residence, education, family relationships, the founding of Afriquia in 1959, the 1992 restructuring, the 1993 reorganisation as Akwa Holding, the April 1999 listing of Afriquia Gaz, the November 2007 chairmanship, the roster of directorships, and published company results.
These come from company filings, the Casablanca Stock Exchange, corporate histories, market directories and Forbes. They are cited on the Insights page.
Verified
What it does not.
Ali Wakrim has given very few public interviews, and no body of quotations, speeches, published articles or personal statements is available. This site therefore contains none. There are no invented quotes, no attributed opinions and no manufactured awards or engagements.
Where this site interprets — on the Philosophy and Perspectives pages — the interpretation is labelled as such and reasoned from documented actions rather than presented as his words.
Editorial interpretation