Public transport workers on strike RED public buses were nowhere to be seen this week in Cairo, as employees from 34 garages affiliated to the Public Transportation Authority started a general strike Sunday. The latest action was launched after workers at various garages launched sporadic strikes over the past two weeks. Participants in the strike are demanding an increase in the retirement bonus to the equivalent of pay for 100 months. They are also demanding that authority's affiliation be transferred from Cairo governorate to the Ministry of Transport. They want to see medical services and working conditions for the technical workers improved. Striking workers also filed complaints to the prosecutor-general and the Council of State against senior authority officials, with accusations of corruption, pocketing workers' bonuses, and profiteering from selling advertisements on buses and from selling buses as scraps. Yellow remittancesn on their way BOTH Egypt and Iraq are about to finalise a $1 billion compensation deal for losses incurred by Egyptians working in Iraq during the invasion of Kuwait and the first Gulf War, during the period of 1990 to 1991. The compensation package covers remittances that banks stopped transferring on the day of the invasion, 2 August 1990. It also includes interest rates on those deposits. A technical committee composed of Egyptian experts was set up, to discuss the interest rate issue. The committee is set to visit Baghdad soon, according to officials at the Ministry of Manpower and Emigration. Iraq's foreign minister told the local state television on Sunday that his country is committed to returning all the yellow remittances to Egyptians, as evidence of its respect for its obligations towards other countries. Yellow remittances is a term coined back in the early 1990s and cover bank deposits, real estate, businesses and other assets Egyptians lost after the invasion. Tapping into budget reserves THE GOVERNMENT is set to reallocate LE1.3 billion from its budget reserves to general expenses, according to a Ministry of Finance statement. Of this sum, LE900 million will be used to purchase much-needed petrol, raising Egypt's total annual allocations to the General Petroleum Authority to LE17.7 billion. This reallocation is a standard procedure which does not affect the budget's end results, according to a research note by Beltone Financial. The note added that budget reserves are funds put aside for every item of expenditure to cover any price fluctuations or a shift in priorities. Among the new allocations are LE146 million for Egypt's agriculture bank, to help subsidise farmers. The transportation authority will also receive a further LE87 million to continue revamping Cairo's Metro system, which recently saw the opening of its third line. Bread subsidies will also chew LE 9.5 million of the new allocations. NBE's Amer to step down TAREK Amer, chief executive officer at the National Bank of Egypt (NBE), will resign from his position by the end of this year, he told journalists earlier this week, without saying why. Amer will also resign from his position as the head of Egypt's banking federation. He denied having received any offers from other local or international banks. Before moving to the NBE, Amer was deputy governor of the Central Bank of Egypt (CBE) for five years. He has also held senior positions at Banque Misr, Citibank and the Egyptian American Bank. On February 2011, Farouk El-Okda refused a resignation that Amer had submitted on the back of protests in the bank, amid accusations to its head of mismanagement and preferential treatment for his aides. NBE is Egypt's largest commercial bank, with a market share of 27 per cent. Citadel Capital ventures into insurance brokerage EGYPT's largest private equity group Citadel Capital is set to establish a direct insurance brokerage firm, with an issued capital of LE2 million. The company's ownership structure will involve a financial investment expert with experience in the insurance sector, with Citadel Capital holding the largest stake through its fully-owned platform company for financial services, Finance Unlimited. The group's opportunity-specific funds control companies with investments of more than $9 billion in 15 industries, including energy, mining, agrifoods, cement and transportation. The group's shares have been traded on the Egyptian stock exchange since 2009. LE4 billion annual losses from illicit cigarettes trade THE ABSENCE of local production specifications and the low price of illicit cigarette brands -- with some selling for as little as LE1 per pack -- are feeding a surge in illicit cigarette trade, according to a British-American Tobacco study. The study showed that there are currently more than 100 low-cost, illicit brands, representing at least 20 per cent of the 84 billion cigarette market in Egypt. This illicit trading is costing the government LE4 billion annually. The percentage of these products to the overall market was only 0.03 per cent at the end of 2010. British-American Tobacco partly blames the industry's aggressive taxation on traders selling illicit products with sky-high margins, mounting to seven times that of legitimate products. "There are no signs of the phenomenon slowing down, with products flooding the market from transit points at the Egyptian-Libyan borders as well as from Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, China and duty-free and border shops," according to the study.
