New petroleum contracts MINISTER of Petroleum Sherif Ismail has signed nine crude-oil and natural-gas exploration agreements in the Gulf of Suez, Sinai and the eastern and western deserts, the Petroleum Ministry said in a statement last week. The contracts, the first since 2010, will require minimum investments of $470 million and the drilling of 15 wells. Ismail said that the new contracts were a positive message and vote of confidence in Egypt's ability to attract petroleum investments, adding that the international companies involved had been keen to work in Egypt. Royal Dutch Shell Plc, Pico International Petroleum, a unit of Pico Holdings Inc, Greystone Oil and Gas LLP, and Petzed Investment and Project Management were among the winners of the exploration contracts. Ismail said that the new contracts had come in the light of the government's efforts to boost oil production. Egypt has been scrambling to increase its oil and gas exploration and attract foreign companies to help meet growing domestic demand and declining output after the 25 January Revolution and the consequent economic slowdown. The country is also seeking bids to import liquefied natural gas through a tender whose results have not yet been announced. Following the 30 June Revolution, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait have been supplying Egypt with fuel products as part of a $12 billion aid package. The three Gulf countries have been sending diesel, gasoline and fuel oil to Egypt since July. The Egyptian General Petroleum Corporation now owes foreign partners around $6 billion for past fuel supplies. New river port IN A BID to exploit the Nile further as a means of transportation, a new river port facility, the Nile Stevedoring and Storage Company, was inaugurated last week. The facility is owned by the Wadi Group, a leading agri-business company, and MedSofts, a commodity supply chain management company. The new port has the capacity to stevedore 600 tonnes of grain and seeds per hour via a floating discharge terminal which in turn should help reduce congestion at the port of Alexandria and grow the stevedoring capacity of the port by two million tonnes per year, representing a 22 per cent additional stevedoring capacity. The port will also provide storage services, accommodating 17 silos with a total storage capacity of 130,000 tonnes, in addition to offering discharge equipment. Interest rates unchanged DURING its meeting last Thursday, the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) of the Central Bank of Egypt (CBE) decided to keep interest rates at their current levels, a move that many analysts expected as the government is now prioritising stimulating the economy while keeping an eye on inflation. The bank kept its deposit rate at 8.75 per cent and its lending rate at 9.75 per cent. “The pronounced downside risks to domestic GDP combined with the persistently negative output gap since 2011 will limit upside risks to the inflation outlook going forward,” the bank said in a statement. “Given the mixed balance of risks surrounding the inflation and GDP outlooks at this juncture, the MPC judges that the current key CBE rates are appropriate,” it said. The local economy has been slowing since the 25 January Revolution, with a growth rate of 2.1 per cent in the year ending in June 2013. This comes as the inflation rate has been edging up to exceed 10 per cent in September. The MPC has cut overnight interest rates by 50 basis points twice since August. Egypt returns Qatari deposit EGYPT returned $500 million to Qatar at the beginning of November, after Qatar refused to renew a bond of this value on maturity, a Central Bank of Egypt official told Reuters on Monday. A further $500 million will be returned early next month, according to the official. Qatar had deposited the funds with the bank in late 2012. Relations between Cairo and Doha have been tense since the ouster of former president Mohamed Morsi, who hails from the Muslim Brotherhood group supported by Qatar. Qatar gave or lent Egypt some $7.5 billion during Morsi's one year in power. Last month, Egypt returned $2 billion that Qatar had deposited with the Central Bank in Cairo, after talks to convert the funds into three-year bonds had broken down.
