Egypt’s Red Sea sukuk plot can now also be used to pay down public debt

Good morning, wonderful people. Selling property in Cairo right now means competing with developers who double as the market’s lenders. Resale owners are pricing their units off developers’ headline figures, which carry up to a decade of installments inside them. To a buyer who can earn 20% at the bank, those asking prices look steep, so most owners would rather hold than cut. Our top story today looks at why asking prices haven’t fallen, and how long the wait could run.

In earnings, Banque du Caire would have grown its 9M income about 19% without last year’s one-offs, with its cost of risk cut roughly in half. CIRA Education more than tripled its normalized net income as its campuses filled up.

On the energy front, Cheiron committed just over USD 42 mn to drill for gas off East Alexandria as the state pushes to lift output to 6.2 bcf / d by 2027.

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Land for debt

The 2.7k-feddan Red Sea plot the state set aside for sovereign sukuk can now also be used to cut public debt under Decree 448 of 2026, which President Abdel Fattah El Sisi approved and the Official Gazette published. Law 222 of 2026, which was ratified in June, had earmarked the land for sukuk only.

REMEMBER- A senior government official told us in June that the new Zafarana allocation would expand the Finance Ministry’s asset pool for its local sukuk program. Investors get usufruct rights for the life of the sukuk, while any sale or transfer of the land is explicitly barred.

The change puts the plot on the same footing as the 174 sq km Ras Shukeir zone, which the government allocated last year for both debt reduction and sukuk. A Gulf sovereign wealth fund was then set to announce a project there as part of a push to replicate the Ras El Hekma agreement with ADQ. Using land this way lets the state exploit the asset without disposing of, selling, or depreciating it, since many sukuk securitize the revenues generated from the asset and don’t grant subscribers the right to own it.

There’s plenty of debt to cut: Budget-sector debt stood at EGP 17.85 tn, or 83.9% of GDP, at the end of March 2026 — EGP 13.68 tn domestic and EGP 4.17 tn (USD 76.6 bn) external, as we reported earlier this month. The ministry’s strategy for FY 2026/27–2028/29 aims to bring the ratio down to 71-73% by the end of FY 2028/29.

Life before listing

The state took its upcoming Misr Life Ins. IPO to Brookfield Asset Management’s top Middle East executives on the sidelines of the B20 USA 2026 summit in Washington, with Investment and Foreign Trade Minister Mohamed Farid presenting the insurer’s upgrades in governance, management, and digitization as selling points, according to a ministry statement. And Brookfield has capital to put to work here: the firm manages more than USD 20 bn in the region, recently launched a USD 2.1 bn regional private equity fund, and says it’s interested in Egyptian ins., pharma, renewables, and infrastructure sectors.

What’s next: The offering of Misr Life, owned by Sovereign Fund of Egypt subsidiary Misr Ins. Holding, is now expected in December and will see up to 20% of its share capital sold, with our friends at EFG Hermes tapped as sole global coordinators and bookrunners.

Priced and parceled

Vodafone Egypt will own about 30% of the joint venture building the country’s largest data center and its first sovereign AI data center with Elsewedy Electric and Cassava Technologies, Vodacom Group CEO Shameel Joosub told TechCentral. The roughly USD 1 bn price tag covers the whole project, which will go up in modules as demand materializes: “The number is big, but it won’t be USD 1 bn immediately.” The partners will finance through a mix of equity and debt, and Vodacom will probably handle “the lion’s share of the sales of the data center to customers,” Joosub told Bloomberg.

REMEMBER- The partners unveiled the projects in September, targeting 20 MW of capacity within three years and 192 MW at full build-out. That pledge joins a long list: we wrote in October about how far Egypt’s pipeline of announced data centers runs ahead of the capacity actually funded.

More pumps, new partners

Libya’s OLA Energy plans to invest EGP 2 bn (c. USD 37 mn) in 20 new integrated fuel stations in Egypt in FY 2027/28, Asharq Business reports, citing an unnamed source. The expansion would add to the company’s local network of about 120 stations and an oil-blending plant in Alexandria, which the source puts at some EGP 12 bn in total investment so far.

OLA is also eyeing stations that have gone dark. The source says it’s studying a partnership with state-owned Misr Petroleum and Cooperation Petroleum to launch a joint brand that would rehabilitate and run fuel stations that have shut down or are struggling by reusing existing assets, rather than building from scratch. It wouldn’t be the first private operator to take on state-linked stations: Taqa Arabia is set to manage 172 of NSPO-owned Wataneya’s stations.

PSA-

WEATHER- Cairo is warming a notch today, with a high of 25°C and a low of 15°C, a degree up on yesterday’s high and a full two degrees warmer overnight, according to our favorite weather app.

It’s a close match on the coast in Alexandria, with a high of 24°C and a low of 16°C.

And over the weekend, expect to see a touch more warmth in the capital (26°C on Friday, rising to 27°C on Saturday) and as low as 17°C for our friends on the Mediterranean.

The big story abroad

The PLA-linked Northwestern Polytechnical University bought Nvidia’s H200 AI chips last month despite a US blacklist, Reuters reports, citing procurement and corporate records. The report adds to investor jitters at Nvidia, which is investigating claims that Chinese intelligence targeted CEO Jensen Huang. Northwestern is one of the “Seven Sons of National Defense,” a group of US-sanctioned schools with a history of defense research for Beijing. The university bought the chips for its management school through Shaanxi Bosuan Network Technology rather than directly from Nvidia. The Trump administration began approving some H200 exports to China case by case in January, but separate restrictions on Entity List organizations such as Northwestern still apply.

Two days of Ukraine peace talks in Abu Dhabi ended without a breakthrough. The US side said it saw “some openings,” however, and Moscow and Kyiv both confirmed that a large-scale prisoner-of-war exchange could happen soon. US negotiators Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner will fly to Moscow on Thursday to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin, followed by a visit to Dublin to meet Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Kushner said getting Europe “added to the format” would be on his agenda with Putin. Territory remains the sticking point: Moscow continues to demand that Ukraine give up the parts of Donetsk it still controls, and Kremlin negotiator Vladimir Medinsky said “every inch” of land would be “returned to Russia one way or another.”

A shortfall of nearly 1 mn homes triggered Spain’s first general strike since 2012. The walkout involved 4 mn people braving stormy weather to set up picket lines over the housing crisis, less than three weeks before an early general election. Shops shut across major cities, including Madrid and Barcelona, global fashion brands included. Spain’s largest unions reported 90% turnout at ports and in the auto sector, as well as “total stoppages” at factories including Volkswagen’s in Navarre and Seat’s in Barcelona.