Officials from the Egyptian Stock Exchange will meet with officials from the General Authority for Financial Control and Misr for Central Clearing, Depositary and Registry on Sunday to set a date for the resumption of stock market trading. The vice president of the securities sector of the Egyptian Federation of Chambers of Commerce said his sector has put together a memorandum on the crisis facing brokerage companies, including lay-offs and salary reductions. The memo includes suggestions for overcoming the crisis, he added. The suggestions, Al-Masry Al-Youm has learned, include using funds to be provided by the Finance Ministry--LE250 million--as a goodwill loan to be paid off in fixed installments. Every company will be able to take out a loan equal to 30 percent of its capital, with a maximum of LE10 million per company. A second suggestion is to use the non-commercial risks fund--a total of LE800 million--to support brokerage companies, provided they contribute a fixed percentage of their transactions to the fund in daily subscriptions. The second suggestion may help ease the situation, said a former stock market official, but would require amending the rules of the fund, which in turn would require the approval of the Egyptian cabinet. Translated from the Arabic Edition.
