The Talaat Mustafa Group is pressing ahead with investment plans, aiming to spend LE18 billion ($3 billion) on two main projects in the next three years, newspaper reports Company official Tarek El-Naggar has said Talaat Mustafa Group (TMG) would spend LE6 billion ($1 billion) each year on its flagship Madinaty and El-Rehab developments, funded partly from client receivables, Al-Mal newspaper reported Thursday. The company had not decided whether to seek bank loans to cover some of the planned investments, Naggar said. TMG, Egypt's largest listed property developer, has stepped up overall investments despite the sharp economic slowdown caused by the popular uprising that toppled Hosni Mubarak in February, Naggar told the paper.It has LE33.6 billion ploughed into projects, up from LE31.9 billion at the end of 2010, Al-Mal cited Naggar as saying. The company saw first-half net profits slide 44 per cent as a popular uprising and industry turmoil dented its hotels business and disrupted deliveries of new homes. The firm, which has suffered the brunt of a crisis in Egypt's once-booming real estate industry, made a profit of LE371.2 million ($62.3 million), down from LE662.4 million last year, the bourse said Wednesday. This week, a judicial committee shed new doubts on TMG's landmark project, Madinaty.The committee issued a report with legal notes on the new Madinaty land allocationcontract, according to El-Shorouk newspaper.The remarks raise doubts about the method through which land was repriced. It also contested the legality of reviewing a contract that was already awarded, and the authority of the State Council to amend it. Last year, an Egyptian court scrapped the deal selling state land for TMG's Madinaty project. Theproject has been mired in a legal row since the court said the land on which it is built should have been sold at auction.The government's answer was to revoke the original contract and return the land to TMG under a new deal on the same terms, based on its right to act in the national interest.A case is currently filed to contest the new contract. In June, Egypt's Administrative Court postponed the mentioned case as another judicial board supported the legitimacy of the sale.The judge stated that the ruling would be postponed to 4 October in order to grant lawyers who filed the case a chance to review the board's report, according to news agencies.
