Egypt's Council of Ministers has agreed to invalidate the original land contract for the Madinaty urban development project and resell the land in question to the Talaat Mustafa Group (TMG), which had purchased it previously in a no-bid deal, for a total of LE9,979,200,000. The decision was taken following a four-hour meeting on Sunday headed by Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif. According to Council of Ministers spokesman Magdi Radi, the Housing Ministry's Urban Development Authority (UDA) has the right to resell the land to TMG under Article 31 (bis) of the law regulating the sale of state-owned land, which allows for the allocation of public land to investors via direct order rather than by way of auction. On 14 September, an Egyptian court annulled the contract signed between TMG and the UDA following a lawsuit filed by businessman Hamdy al-Fakharany. In the suit, al-Fakharany claimed that TMG had won the contract in direct contravention of Egyptian law. Experts, meanwhile, say that real estate investment in Egypt has fallen by some 70 percent since the crisis surrounding the Madinaty project first emerged earlier this summer. At a conference on Sunday organized by the Egyptian Center for Economic and Social Rights, pro-reform activist Hassan Nafea declared that Egypt's ruling regime had committed "two crimes" in its handling of the Madinaty case. “The first was when it initially sold the land to TMG at a rebate," Nafea said. "The second was when it circumvented the law in order to protect the interests of a handful of businessmen." Translated from the Arabic Edition.
