Morocco’s Court of Cassation will decide in the coming months whether a bank commits a banking fault when its ATM retains a customer’s card, a question now before the country’s highest court after a bank appealed a ruling ordering it to compensate a client, Medias24 reports. The case, filed in May, stems from a lawsuit brought by a client who was deprived of his card for four days after it was retained by a machine.
The claimant won at both first instance and on appeal, securing 5,000 dirhams in damages for banking fault, a decision the bank is now contesting before the Court of Cassation. The incident occurred at an ATM belonging to a branch that was closed for renovations at the time, though its cash machine remained operational. The client, a lawyer by profession, had the facts recorded by a bailiff, who noted a decisive element beyond the card retention itself: the absence of any signage indicating the branch’s closure or the transfer of its services.
That specific element proved decisive before Casablanca’s commercial court, which found that card retention alone does not automatically establish a bank’s liability, since such incidents can result from technical or security considerations.
Liability is established, however, when a bank keeps a distributor in service without providing “technical or human on-call support” to process the request and ensure the card’s return within a reasonable timeframe.
The judges also found that even temporary deprivation of a card constitutes compensable harm in itself, meaning a claimant need not prove financial loss to obtain damages. Since a card usually lets a client access funds and make payments, denying that access infringes a “legitimate faculty” and disrupts day-to-day financial management, the commercial court found. Those findings were upheld by an appeals court ruling in February, a decision the bank is now asking the Court of Cassation to reconsider.