A court in Bir Mourad Rais, Algiers, has sentenced the former mayor of Algiers-Centre, Hakim Bettache, to four years in prison for abuse of office. The verdict relates to a project involving 1,400 participatory social housing units, which suffered a twelve-year delay. The property developer, Noureddine Laklak, received a seven-year prison sentence for fraud and swindling after collecting payments between 800,000 and 1.5 million dinars from subscribers without ever launching the construction work. A total of 1,000 out of the 1,400 affected subscribers had filed civil party complaints to bring the case to court.