[1] Ben Ayed came from a makhzen family of Djerbian origin, which entered service after 1756 in the Beylical court and formed a dynasty of caïds, corsair shipowners and tax farmers.
[2] Ben Ayed was involved in the startup of various modern industrial enterprises in Tunisia, and gradually gained control of the tax farms on hides, salt, tobacco, and provisioning the army.
To bridge this gap, Ben Ayed sold licences, known as teskérés, which entitled the holder to the customs revenue from the export of olive oil.
[7] After two years of deliberations the Emperor announced the finding of the commission on 30 October 1856: Ben Ayed was found not to have properly discharged his duties as a director of the Dar al-Mal, and was ordered to return the banknotes he had taken out of Tunisia and to pay a sum equivalent to the value of notes he had improperly put into circulation, totalling 995,850 piastres.
In addition, he was found liable for seventeen and a half million piastres, the value of fraudulent teskérés he had sold; licenses to sell olive oil to French buyers who had not in fact agreed to purchase any.
[8] The arbitration decision did not cover all the matters in dispute, and avoided any statement of criminal wrongdoing, but the Bey of Tunis was unable to enforce it in any case and Ben Ayed did not make good any of the sums he had defrauded others of.
[10]: 441–447 In 1857 the new Bey of Tunis Muhammad II ibn al-Husayn, faced with the deficits of the Tunisian treasury, set up a special commission to clear the accounts of the State.
The Tunisian government sent several emissaries, including Generals Husseïn and Rachid, to try to bring him back to Tunisia, but to no avail; Ben Ayed decamped to Istanbul in 1857, still with sufficient funds to buy more properties and to secure his entry into the highest level networks of influence in the Ottoman capital.