Egypt has announced the signing of several agreements to sell state assets worth $1.9 billion in an effort to strengthen its private sector.
The declaration was made late on Tuesday by Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly.
The contracts are considered essential to easing pressure on the Egyptian pound, boosting hard currency reserves, and enabling a number of economic reforms under a $3 billion IMF loan program.
The new contracts call for the sale of stakes in the state-owned telecom company Telecom Egypt, minority stakes in three companies in the oil and petrochemical industries to the sovereign wealth fund of Abu Dhabi for $800 million, $700 million for stakes in a portfolio of hotels to ICON, the hospitality division of Egyptian real estate group Talaat Mostafa, and a stake in the Ezz Dekheila steel company for $241 million.
In spite of the fact that the most populous Arab nation is still struggling with a dire economic crisis, Madbouly claimed that the government is one-quarter of the way through a list of 32 state companies in which it will sell stakes.
Egypt is one of the top wheat importers in the world, and its economy has suffered as a result of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, one of the biggest exporters of wheat, last year.
Egypt’s currency has lost nearly half of its value since Russia’s invasion, forcing foreign investors to withdraw more than $20 billion from the country’s bond markets as inflation hit record highs.
About a third of Egypt’s 105 million people, are estimated to be poor.
Egypt announced a plan in April 2022 to entice $10 billion in investments over the next four years. Egypt also needs to implement privatization measures in the coming months to meet its foreign debt obligations.
By the end of June, the government aimed to raise $2 billion through stake sales, but delays caused the Egyptian pound’s value to decline even more.
In the upcoming months, Egypt intends to sell additional stakes, including those in the Siemens power plant, the military-owned Wataniya Petroleum, and the Gabal el-Zeit wind farm, according to Planning Minister Hala el-Said.
Source-Aljazeera
