As most of the third world countries and for many reasons, Algeria is not an easy place to collect your debt, that’s why you need to have a reliable and suitable debt collection process or/and an effective local partner who knows how to deal with your debtors. I am going now to expose the various methods that we use to collect a late payment with a debtor located in Algeria.
1-Amicable collection:
Amicable collection is highly recommended if you care to maintain business relationship with your debtor and you posses clear evidence about his solvency(using a third party credit report service for example). In the deep Algerian business culture, using a legal action against a company is considered as a declaration of war, and you have no chance to win another contract with your debtor.for this specific category of debtors, and depending on the type of companies (Private or state ownership) late payments are mostly outside the responsibility of the debtor. A very long and bureaucratic bank processing is singled out as the main cause, especially if your invoice concerns shipped Equipment or goods and you agree to be paid upon documentary delivery. Concerning services, some additional documents are required from the Tax authority in order to pay foreign suppliers. Customs and freight forwarding issues, accounts payable operational practices, are to be considered as consistent reasons too.
What you can do : as a creditor, you must keep in mind to make regular reminders, phone calls are likely an efficient way that enforces your debtor to maintain pressure on his own bank, on customs, on freight forwarder, on his own team or on any third party involved in payment process. You should also think to use the service of a local debt collection agency, we learned from our experience as local debt collection professionals that our legal and physical presence in the same country is a dreadful summation for the debtor.
2-Legal collection:
If the amicable collection fails, the legal action become necessary.To do this, sending at least, one legal formal notice through a bailiff must be prior to any legal action you will take. You must send the letter with an acknowledgment of receipt and giving your debtor a period of 08 or 15 days since the receipt date to proceed the payment. Depending on your debtor solvency, commercial court claim (Injunction de payer) is the second mostly common way used in legal actions. You need to submit to the commercial court where your debtor is located, joining the complete file proving the debt, and any reminder sent by your own, and at least, one legal formal notice through a bailiff. To do so, you can count on the service of a local debt collection agency, or a lawyer, some courts are accepting that a creditor submit his own commercial claim. If your commercial court claim success, the debtor will have 15 working days to submit an official objection, if he don’t, the court decision is considered as an enforcement order, you need then to use the service of a bailiff to execute the order, most of creditors fail in a major mistake by trying to execute an enforcement order without investigating about debtor’s assets first. If the debtor opposes the court decision during the 15 days, the commercial court claim turns into a full legal procedure.
Unfortunately for creditors, and except for the case of bankruptcy, Algerian law does not provide any insolvency proceeding.
Is one of your debtors located in Algeria and late in making a payment? Then simply transfer the file to us, At Algeria collection services EURL, we have been helping exporters from various countries around the world for over 10 years to recover their outstanding debts, not only in Algeria but also in many other African countries.Don’t hesitate to contact us by email at contact@dzacs.com if you have any questions, or simply fill in the following form to tell us more about your debt : https://dzacs.com/index.php/request-a-quotation/.
