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The Finance Ministry was in damage control on the airwaves last night, rebutting suggestions that it inked an additional and never-before-announced credit facility amounting to USD 2 bn. Representing the ministry was Assistant Finance Minister for Economic Affairs Sherine El Sharkawy, who called in to tell Lamees El Hadidi on Kelma Akhira to argue her case (watch, runtime: 4:41).
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El Sharkawy was responding to an EmiratesNDB statement out Friday, which said that the Finance Ministry was securing a USD 2 bn syndicated facility. The 2.5x oversubscribed facility will go towards bolstering the “country’s budgetary requirements and support the country in safeguarding its strong economic path in the prevailing volatile global markets,” according to the statement.
But this isn’t the first time we’d heard about the facility and it's been in the works for a while now, which led to the Finance Ministry, in addition to talkshow appearances, issuing a statement denying that it had obtained any new credit facilities — emphasis here on the new.
The House approved the loan last December, which many avid readers of EnterpriseAM would have already known from our coverage at the time. “What the bank mentioned in its statement pertains to the same USD 2 bn loan that Egypt obtained whose agreement was approved by the House of Representatives in mid-December,” El Sharkawy explained.
El Sharkawy attributed the confusion to "the delay in the bank's announcement of the loan, which came after completing the necessary procedures and translation, before issuing the statement in Arabic on its part," clarifying that the ministry had already disclosed the loan back in December. She rejected the notion that the country had received any new loans.
AND- The nation’s talking heads also gave significant airtime to the freeing of 200 Palestinian and four Israeli hostages, marking the second such swap under the ceasefire’s first six-week phase. (El Hekaya watch, runtime: 26:51 | Al Hayat Al Youm watch, runtime: 8:31 | Akher Kalema watch, runtime: 6:35, 1:43).
