House committee narrows tax relief, restores audit oversight in Mostakbal Misr bill

House committee amends Mostakbal Misr bill: A joint parliamentary committee has amended a government bill for the Mostakbal Misr Authority for Sustainable Development, narrowing its tax relief, limiting its jurisdiction to land it owns, capping its fee increases, and restoring the state auditor's oversight, according to the committee report reviewed by EnterpriseAM.

Mostakbal Misr disputes the coverage: The authority issued a statement rejecting media readings of its status, mandate, and oversight arrangements as inaccurate, saying the parliamentary process was transparent and the final text balances its development mandate with governance and rule-of-law requirements. It urged media and researchers to verify against official sources, and said it has a right under the law to act against the deliberate spread of false information.

REMEMBER- The initial government-drafted bill would have turned Mostakbal Misr from a Defence Ministry-backed land reclamation project into a standalone economic body reporting directly to the president, with broad financial autonomy, wide tax exemptions, and exceptional treatment under the law. The committee has revised several of those provisions and reinstated standard regulatory, fiscal, and audit rules.

The portfolio it manages: The authority oversees a 4.5 mn-feddan reclamation project, a 500k-ton silo complex, some 1.5k retail outlets, livestock farms with a targeted annual output of around 180k head, the Sphinx crop-trading center (20 mn tons of trading and storage capacity), 12 poultry slaughterhouses, solar projects totaling 2.32k MW, and 26 applied agri-tech schools.

What changed?

On tax: The committee removed the draft provision under which the Treasury would have covered the authority’s taxes and fees, and struck an open-ended clause that would have let its zones claim exemptions requiring a special legislative provision. The zones still carry the tax and customs treatment of a freezone. Separately, the authority — rather than the Treasury — would cover its own social ins. contributions as an employer, with a four-year, no-interest window to settle legacy dues owed to the National Authority for Social Ins.

On litigation: In place of the draft’s broad bar on lawsuits, the revised text limits challenges to the authority’s contracts and related decisions to the parties to those contracts, while preserving litigation rights for holders of personal or in-kind property rights. The committee said the change was meant to avoid conflict with Article 97 of the constitution.

On land: The committee narrowed the authority's real-estate reach to land whose ownership has transferred to it, rather than plots it manages under usufruct contracts or memoranda of understanding. Subsidiaries would remain subject to the sector laws governing their sector of activity, and — reversing the draft, which had exempted them — to the state-ownership law (Law 170/2025).

On audits: The committee deleted the clause limiting the Central Auditing Organization to issuing annual performance reports, restoring the CAO’s standard oversight of the authority. The committee also routed several decisions through the House — decrees creating a sustainable-development zone, or attaching an existing area to the authority, would go to the House for approval at its first general session, and the authority’s annual report would go to the House alongside the president and prime minister.

What’s next: The joint committee presents its final report to the House general assembly for discussion on Monday. Once the law takes effect, the authority would have a one-year window to bring its administrative and operational status into line, which the president could extend by up to three years in total.