Sawiris, Al Nowais eye Morocco’s tourism industry

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#1- Sawiris, Al Nowais eye Morocco’s booming tourism sector: An Egyptian-Emirati consortium is planning to invest EUR 200 mn in the first phase of a large-scale tourism project in Essaouira, Morocco, a report suggests. The consortium includes Egyptian hospitality group Sunrise and b’naire Samih Sawiris, and the UAE-based Al Nowais Group.

The details so far: The partners are looking to build out 800 hotel rooms as well as retail and entertainment space over a five-year period. The first 270-room hotel is reportedly slated to be ready by the end of 2027.

Why Morocco? The kingdom’s tourism momentum — and resilience — are doing much of the selling. Morocco welcomed a record 19.8 mn visitors in 2025, up 14% y-o-y, and is targeting more than 26 mn tourists before 2030. Tourist arrivals to Morocco rose 18% last month despite a region-wide tourism drop in the wake of the US-Israel war on Iran. The March surge drove an overall 7% y-o-y rise in 1Q arrivals to Morocco, with 4.3 mn people touching down.

#2- Speaking of travel and tourism: Hajj flight season has started, with Saudi — the kingdom’s flagship carrier — saying on Sunday that the first flight carrying pilgrims for the upcoming 2026 season had arrived in Jeddah.

Setting the record straight

Lebanon’s next liquidity lifeline could come from the World Bank (WB) — not the IMF, Lebanese Finance Minister Yassine Jaber said on Friday. Previous reports had suggested the country might be looking for as much as USD 1 bn in emergency funding, but from the IMF.

The World Bank is open to the idea, but it’s a bit early to talk about the size of a facility, President Ajay Banga said a day later. Officials will first need to take stock of the damage and reconstruction needs in the wake of Israel’s latest war on the country. Lebanon lined up a USD 200 mn package from the bank last week to shore-up its emergency safety net program.

Data point

USD 50 bn — that’s the value of lost crude production since the start of the Iran war, according to Reuters calculations. The data point confirms what we already knew in our guts: This is the largest energy disruption to the global energy market in modern history. More than 500 mn barrels of crude and condensate were shaved off the global ⁠market in just 50 days, the equivalent of 5 days of global consumption of crude. Gulf countries’ production alone lost about 8 mn bb / d in March.