“A pleasant surprise” is how president Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi described the news he was planning to reveal to the Egyptian public after the Eid holidays. The surprise turned out to be a new waterway to be dug in parallel to the existing Suez Canal and fully financed by Egypt. The new canal will be 72 km long, 35 of which will be dug afresh with the remaining 37 km expanding and deepening the current Canal. The overall cost will be $4 billion, according to Chairman of the Suez Canal Authority Mohab Mamish. The new facility will limit the waiting time vessels spend in the Canal from 11 to less than three hours, increasing its capacity and thus increasing demand and bolstering revenues. “As global trade grows and the Egyptian economy develops its sources of hard currency, we have had to think about digging a new Suez Canal,” Mamish said. The work will be carried out by a consortium of 37 Egyptian companies, with the armed forces being in overall charge of the project for security reasons. Mamish said that the new waterway, part of the long-awaited Suez Canal Corridor development project, would take three years to be completed, but Al-Sisi has asked for the work to be limited to one year. The Suez Canal, which links the Mediterranean and Red Seas and is 163km long, originally took 10 years of intense work to build and saw the deaths of thousands of Egyptian workers. It is one of Egypt's main sources of foreign currency, with revenues coming in at $5 billion on average. The canal's revenues could be multiplied through the multi-billion dollar development project that aims at developing 76,000 square km of land around the canal. The corridor project includes massive development plans, including the construction of four new seaports in the three provinces surrounding the Canal, a new industrial zone west of the Gulf of Suez, and a “technology valley” in Ismailia to host several IT-related projects. The new canal project alone will provide one million job opportunities. The project will be financed through public subscription and with loans from banks and friendly countries. In January, Egypt invited 14 consortia to bid for the corridor development plans. It was announced that the consortia should make their bids over a three-month period, after which the selected firms would be announced. The winner would then have another six months to come up with a master plan for the project that would be submitted to public consultation. Mamish did not reveal the name of the wining consortium, but he noted that a French consulting firm had chosen the wining bid and that the Suez Canal Authority had not intervened in evaluating it. The name of the wining consortium and related details were sent to the National Security Authority for clearance. Reuters reported on Sunday that Egypt had chosen a consortium including the global engineering firm Dar Al-Handasah, as well as the Egyptian army, to develop the area. The army's influence on the economic front has been increasing since the former defence minister, now president Al-Sisi, toppled former president Mohamed Morsi last year, who hailed from the Muslim Brotherhood group. While a draft law governing investment in the project stirred a lot of criticism when submitted under Morsi's administration, Mamish said that a new bill had now been presented to the Ministry of Justice. The market received the news by breaking a new record on Tuesday, gaining 1.04 points to close at 9010 points, its highest level in more than six years.
