Cairo – Mubasher: Egypt’s negotiations with Shanghai-listed China Fortune Land Development Co (CFLD) for its $20 billion project in the New Administrative Capital went sour, Egyptian officials said.
The two-year talks between both parties have gone nowhere over disagreements on how to share the project’s revenue, Bloomberg News reported.
This came after Egyptian authorities responded to the final proposal by the Chinese builder on the development of a 15,000-acre project over 25 years in the new capital.
“We didn’t hear back,” Ahmed Zaki Abdeen, chairman of the new capital’s company, told Bloomberg, saying, “The talks have stopped.”
The Chinese firm declined to comment, and officials in CFLD Egypt did not respond to requests for comment, the New York-based news agency said.
Egypt’s deputy minister for housing and urban communities Khaled Abbas suggested collaboration between Egyptian authorities and CFLD on another development, though not in the new capital.
“This could be an alternative to the new capital project,” Abbas told Bloomberg in a phone call.
For his part, Khaled Elhusseiny, a spokesman for the new capital’s company, said Egypt wanted to obtain 40% of the project’s revenue, while CFLD offered 33%.
“We found that to be unacceptable especially they were going to have a premium plot,” Elhusseiny added.
In 2016, Egypt’s investment ministry stated that CFDL plans to inject $20 billion in investments within the coming ten years in the new administrative capital.
