TUNIS — President Kais Saied received Ali Abbas, chairman of the National Criminal Conciliation Commission, at the Carthage Palace on Wednesday, and told him the commission must accelerate its handling of files, according to the presidency's account of the meeting published by La Presse and reported by Tuniscope.

The two men reviewed the state of the commission's work and the files submitted by people who have opted for what the presidency described as sincere conciliation. Mr Saied said the state's right to recover public money was subject neither to any statute of limitations nor to compromise with what he called remnants of the former system, which he said had infiltrated several institutions.

He also warned against what he described as procedural mazes used not to reach equitable settlements but to drag cases out or to engage in disguised blackmail. The state, he said, seeks neither revenge nor to keep those concerned in detention or in exile, but only to return the Tunisian people's money.

What the mechanism is, and where it stands

Criminal conciliation was established by decree in 2022. In its design, individuals accused of financial corruption may negotiate a settlement — repayment, or the funding of development projects — in exchange for the closing of proceedings against them. Mr Saied has consistently framed it as a way to channel recovered funds into Tunisia's poorest regions, and recalled on Wednesday that he first proposed the idea in 2012.

The commission Mr Abbas now chairs is the third. According to La Presse, the previous one had been at a standstill since September 2024. Mr Abbas, a third-grade magistrate — the top of the Tunisian judicial hierarchy — was appointed in June and previously served as prosecutor general at the Court of Cassation and as head of the State Litigation department. The new members were sworn in before the president at Carthage on 26 June.

The verification problem

The difficulty in assessing whether the mechanism works is that there is very little to assess it against. La Presse reported in July that since the scheme was created in 2022, no official institution appears to have published a consolidated tally of what the successive commissions have done: how many files were received, how many produced a signed agreement, and how much money actually reached the Treasury. Only partial figures have circulated, disclosed orally by commission members at various points.

That gap matters in both directions. It makes it impossible for the public to judge the mechanism's record, and it also makes it impossible for the government to demonstrate a record if one exists. The president's own diagnosis on Wednesday — that files are being slowed deliberately — cannot be tested by anyone outside the process.

The Ridha Charfeddine case illustrates the friction. His defence has said since December 2025 that he has entered a criminal conciliation procedure; on 13 July, the specialised criminal chamber of the Tunis court of first instance again postponed his trial, along with that of two co-defendants, at the defence's request pending the outcome of that procedure. La Presse noted that such successive postponements sit awkwardly beside the president's call to conclude agreements quickly and without haggling.

What would make the third attempt measurable

The proposal most often advanced by Tunisian commentators on this file is not a change of law but a change of disclosure. La Presse argued in July that publishing a full account of the commissions' activity since 2022 — files processed, agreements signed, sums paid — would allow a calmer evaluation of this third attempt, and that in the absence of such figures the doubt will keep growing rather than confidence.

Comparable asset-recovery bodies elsewhere publish periodic reports precisely for this reason: a recovery mechanism that operates confidentially on individual cases can still report aggregates. Whether the new commission adopts that practice will be an early and fairly reliable signal of how this attempt differs from the two before it.