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Egypt steps up economic liberalisation
CAIRO, Feb 17: The Egyp tian government announced that it will prtvatiae a wide range of hotels, stores and banks in another step towards economic liberalisation, an official said yesterday, reports AFP.
The cabinet has decided to sell 72 businesses.'' Informa tlon Minister Safwat Al-Sherif said in a statement.
"Fourteen food and homeappliances business will be completely privatised, while the rest will be partially privatised."
The government also decided to sell 36 hotels, including nine floating ones, but excluded the privatisation of "a few hotels having an historic and architectural value" such as Mena House near the pyramids, the Marriot and the Manila Palace at the centre of Cairo and the Cataract at Aswan.
Others excluded from the sale are the Winter Palace in Luxor and the Hotel Palestine in Alexandria.
The large department stores, such as the famous Omar Effendi, nationalised by former President Gamal Abdel
Nasser, will be completely privatised." Sherif said.
The value of shares in the • various businesses and banks will be determined over the next two to three months for
an eventual sale to the public. Sherif said.
The government controls 314 businesses, and only 24 have been privatised since plans to liberalise the Egyptian economy were launched in 19^ of the prt
vatlsation was to unload the debt held by public companies "which constitute a buraen on the government’s budget."
The capital of the 290 companies still under state control is estimated at 88 billion Egyptian pounds (25.8 billion dollars), but their debts have reached 71 billion pounds (20.8 billion dollars).
The announced privatisation plans comes two weeks before meetings in Cgiro between Egypt and the International Monetary Fund, which has been pushing Egyptian officials to speed up economic liberalisation in return for forgiving the last slice of development loans estimated at four billion dollars.
Egyptian Finance Minister Mohleddine El-Gharid said last week that an accord would be signed at the Cairo meeting with the IMF to write of the debt.