Reuters NEXT-Egypt's sovereign fund to complete historic hotels sale by year-end

Telecom Egypt SAE

09/11/2023 19:54

(Adds details, hotel company sale)
       NEW YORK, Nov 9 (Reuters) - Egypt will close the sale of
a group of seven hotels, several of them historic, by the end of
the year, the head of the Sovereign Fund of Egypt Ayman Soliman
said on Thursday.
    "It has been awarded. So we're now in partnership moving
towards a close before the end of the year, closing with the
winning investors," Soliman said in an interview at the Reuters
NEXT conference in New York. 
    "They're going to turn around those trophy assets in Egypt,
and with a view of taking those public as well."
    The hotels, among Egypt's grandest, are the Cataract in
Aswan, the Winter in Luxor, the Mena House in Cairo and the
Cecil in Alexandria, all built in the late 19th or early 20th
centuries. 
    Soliman did not give the name of the buyer. In June, Qatar
was reported to be in talks over their purchase, but the
following month Egypt's planning minister announced Egypt had
awarded a $700 million stake in the hotels company to a
consortium that included the local Talaat Mostafa Group Holding
Co. 
    Soliman also said in the interview he believed Egypt's
inflation had peaked and the weakening of its devalued currency
was good for controlling the costs of production. 
    The state statistics agency CAPMAS is scheduled to release
October inflation figures on Saturday. Headline inflation
accelerated to an all-time high of 38.0% in September. 
    In the interview, Soliman also said there had been good
uptake of assets in Egypt's hospitality and tourism sector, one
of the areas in which the government is trying to boost private
sector participation and raise revenue by selling state
holdings. 
    "We thrive on creating those partnerships with the private
sector to take leadership and transform state-owned
enterprises," he said. 

 (Reporting by Dan Burns; Writing by Aidan Lewis; Editing by
Mark Heinrich and Daniel Wallis)
 ((Aidan.Lewis@tr.com; +20-1001174410;))