Egypt's Prime Minister Sherif Ismail received on Thursday afternoon German Chancellor Angela Merkel at Cairo airport. Merkel arrived in Cairo Thursday on a two-day visit to meet with Egypt's President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi and to inaugurate with her counterpart the first phase of the German giant Siemens electric power megaproject. El-Sisi and Merkel are scheduled to hold a press conference shortly after their meeting. On her first visit to the country since 2007, Merkel is scheduled to meet Al-Azhar's Grand Imam Ahmed Al-Tayeb and Coptic patriarch Pope Tawadros II. Egypt and Germany have strengthened economic, military and political ties over the past three years. El-Sisi met with the German chancellor in Berlin in May, 2015 during his first official visit to Europe after assuming the Egyptian presidency in 2014. The German company Siemens signed in 2015 an 8 billion euro ($9.05 billion) deal with Egypt to build gas and wind power plants to ease the country's electric power shortages. In 2014, Egypt signed a deal to buy three German submarines. A submarine built by ThyssenKrupp Marine Systems was delivered to Cairo in 2016. Two more German submarines destined for Egypt are currently under construction. In November, the German passenger flights resumed to Sharm El-Sheikh International Airport, putting an end to a one-year ban on flights to the Red Sea resort city after a Russian passenger plane crashed in Sinai in late 2015.
