CAIRO — While the Nile River comes nowhere close to Morocco, the country still may be playing a role in the crisis over the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam because of Rabat's legal and financial tangle with an Ethiopian-born man who has been one of the most prominent investors in the project.
In 2015, Morocco began seizing the assets of Saudi-Ethiopian billionaire Mohammed al-Amoudi, who had monopolized oil refining in Morocco through SAMIR, the only refinery there. Most of the shares of SAMIR, which was founded by the Moroccan government in 1959, were sold to Amoudi's Corral group in the 1990s.
