The Engineering Authority of the Armed Forces has settled on a replacement for the UAE financier of the New Administrative Capital project, arguably the most highly-ambitious project championed by the government of President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi during the investors summit last March in Sharm al-Sheikh, sources said.
The EAAF has opted for the so-called “Urban Development +5”, which comprises five engineering professors from Ain Shams University, to implement the new administrative capital east of Cairo which would cover 700 square kilometers.
The new alliance will apparently replace UAE’s Capital City Partners, a nascent subsidiary of Emaar Misr which was founded especially to implement the project before funding disagreements with the Egyptian government brought negotiations to an end.
The new alliance, led by Ayman Ashour, dean of the Faculty of Engineering at Ain Shams, will be announced within days, said the sources, who added that the project will be entirely undertaken by purely Egyptian developers and labor.
Hassan Abdel Aziz, chairman of the Egyptian Federation for Construction and Building Contractors (EFCBC), told Al-Masry Al-Youm that the federation had tipped the names of 50 companies to concerned authorities to partake in the project.
In June, unsuccessful negotiations with Capital City Partners led to the annulment of the memorandum of understanding (MoU) Egypt signed with the company.
Speaking of the reasons behind the failure of negotiations, a source told Al-Masry Al-Youm that the company had “failed to secure financing resources for the project”. The source added that Capital City Partners was not financially linked to its parent company Emaar, a real estate giant, and therefore would not have access to the same credit when applying for loans from local banks.
Edited translation from Al-Masry Al-Youm
