Minister Marzouk appoints Mohsen Mansouri as chief of staff to energise his ministry

摘要

Mongi Marzouk is continuing to manoeuvre to regain genuine control over the Ministry of Energy and Mines, which he has been back in charge of since late February. Having appointed Hamed El-Matri as his advisor on hydrocarbons and Kamal Charni to take care of PR on 31 March, he has now recruited a chief of staff in the person of Mohsen Mansouri. This controller-general of public finances and graduate of Tunisia's Ecole nationale d'administration (ENA), who since 2018 had been working in the office of the prime minister, worked alongside Marzouk when he first served as minister of energy in 2016. Back then, he was in charge of the strategic "governance unit" responsible for improving transparency in the oil industry, which afforded the Ennahda party an opportunity to have a say on this issue and even use it to its own ends against the then-president Beji Caid Essebsi (Maghreb Confidential, 25/05/17). Mansouri is a longstanding supporter of the Islamist party: the "independent" minister of the interior Lotfi Ben Jeddou, who is very close to Ennahda, appointed him as the governor of Kairouan back in 2014.