An appeal by Egypt has been rejected by a Swiss court that decided to uphold a previous ruling by a French court that ordered Egyptian energy companies to pay $2 billion in compensation to the state-owned Israel Electric Corporation (IEC), an Israeli energy company. The fine is compensation to IEC for the Egyptian companies halting gas supplies to it. In a statement on Friday, IEC said that Egyptian Natural Gas (EGAS) and the Egyptian General Petroleum Corporation (EGPC) were liable because they had been unable to fulfil their commitment to provide IEC with natural gas for Israeli power stations. Egypt exported gas to Israel prior to the 25 January Revolution under a 20-year agreement. After the revolution, Egypt saw declining gas production and public anger over the deal, as well as repeated attacks on the gas pipeline serving Israel. These things prompted Egypt to halt gas supplies to Israel in 2012. The attacks on the pipeline prompted the Israeli companies IEC and the Eastern Mediterranean Gas Company (EMG) to resort to international arbitration, and in 2015 the Geneva-based International Chamber of Commerce said Egypt would have to pay nearly $2 billion in compensation. This week's rejection of Egypt's appeal against the ruling is the last step in the legal process, making Egypt liable to execute the court's verdict, lawyer Mahmoud Fahmi told Al-Ahram Weekly. He said that the legal stage was now over and Egypt should now move to the negotiations stage in which the two parties could discuss ways to execute the verdict. He added that they could negotiate different ways of execution. The government reportedly intends to negotiate with Israel in order to reach a settlement, sources told the Al-Bosra financial newspaper on Saturday. Fahmi said that Israel was reportedly looking to export gas from its own offshore fields, and one way of paying the $2 billion could be through an agreement with Egypt to import gas from Israel. In 2015, Egypt's privately-owned Dolphinus Holdings and its Israeli partner the Delek Group took part in negotiations for Egypt to import gas from the Tamar and Leviathan gas fields in Israel via the EMG pipeline. In November 2015, Dolphinus signed a preliminary agreement with Delek Drilling and Avner Oil and Gas to import gas from Israel's Leviathian field when production begins in 2019. Former petroleum minister Osama Kamal told Al-Borsa that the rejection of Egypt's appeal on the previous case was an attempt to pressure Cairo into easing the conditions that allow companies in Egypt to import gas from Israel. A report by the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR), an NGO, in 2014 showed that contracts signed during former president Hosni Mubarak's tenure had allowed the export of billions of cubic metres of under-priced Egyptian natural gas to Jordan, Spain and Israel, causing the country to lose some $10 billion in revenues from 2005 to 2011. The report said that Egypt had sold Israel natural gas at $0.75 per unit, far lower than the international price at the time.
