The plan to sell the Siemens power plants is more complicated than we thought: Egypt has requested permission from German banks to sell shares in the three 4.8 GW Siemens-built power stations to investors, reports Asharq Business, citing three anonymous government officials. The government earmarked the Beni Suef plant for privatization earlier this year but the financial terms agreed with the project’s backers mean that it will need to get their sign-off before it can start marketing it to investors, according to the new outlet’s sources.

Banks provided bns of EUR for the plants: Germany development bank KfW, Deutsche Bank and HSBC lent EUR 4.1 bn of the EUR 6 bn needed to construct the plants, which were inaugurated in 2018.

Want to sell? There are strings attached: The contracts prevent the government from selling stakes in the plants until the loans are repaid in full, or unless they get permission from the lenders, according to Asharq’s sources.

It’s not clear how much has been repaid: The Egyptian Electricity Holding Company has made regular loan repayments since 2019, the business news outlet reports. It’s unclear how much has been paid back.

The government has talked about selling the plants for years: It began courting potential international investors soon after the plants’ inauguration, and in 2019 entered talks with private equity giants Blackstone and Actis, and Malaysian power company Edra. It was never publicly disclosed what happened to the offers.

The PM now wants to speed things up:Prime Minister Moustafa Madbouly has met with a number of Egyptian officials twice in 10 days to discuss taking steps to offer a stake in the Beni Suef station, Asharq’s sources said. The plant was reported to have been earmarked to be transferred to the Sovereign Fund of Egypt last year ahead of a sale.

The power plants aren’t the only infrastructure up for sale:A report in Asharq last week claimed that the government wants to sell off the country’s two largest wind farms before the end of the year. Infinity Power, ACWA Power, the UAE’s Alcazar Energy, and Hassan Allam Utilities are all interested in acquiring the plants.

BARCLAYS WORKING ON UNITED BANK SALE-

CI Capital has a partner on the United Bank sale: The Central Bank of Egypt has appointed Barclays to join CI Capital as the financial advisors working on the sale of United Bank, it said in a statement (pdf) yesterday.

REMEMBER- The CBE — which owns 99.99% of United Bank — was negotiating to sell the lender to Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund PIF before talks stalled, apparently due to a dispute over valuation amid uncertainty over the exchange rate.

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