What's irritating in the article and this particular quote is confusing non-payment and elastic payment practices - i.e. you're supposed to settle in 90 days and you do so in 120 - and big firms squeezing small supplies on freely agreed on terms. Market terms. Sure, 90 days sucks - but the question is not are the supermarkets imposing 90 days in the contract - which is entirely legal as recall - but rather are they paying according to contract?

The problem is not so much the contracted term of payment (again, yeah, 90 days sucks, but if it's legal then ... well either negotiate better or lump it) but whether the firms are paying according to contract.

The real problem is not the big firms squeezing - although there are certainly competition issues in Morocco and Tunisia, and.... well the whole Arab world, but let's leave market liberalisation and faux liberalisation aside for a moment - but when the firms, big or small, consistently pay no attention to contract and pay whenever the fuck they want to.

So you get the elastic payment schedule, rolling delays and a lot of inefficiences that lock up working capital. You also undermine contracts, create endless logjams of distrust, etc.

Now, getting to the fucking of the little supplier, well, of course faux liberalisation and the rather nasty effect of monopolies or oligopolies in cahoots [odd word, but I like it] with the regime on hand has a nasty effect on competition and all the benefits it is supposed to bring.

Which is to say, it rather undermines what the free market is supposed to be doing for the economy.

But, on the other hand, what can one expect in a region where every damned article contains the phrase En France, il y a as a key point of reference.