CAIRO: Fund manager Beltone Financial plans to raise about $80 million to invest in property in Cairo s historic but decaying downtown, the latest initiative to revive the fortunes of the city s commercial center. The funds will more than double Beltone s investments in central Cairo, and the move comes as a state firm, the Insurance Holding Company, the biggest downtown property owner, says it wants to pedestrianize many streets that are flanked by peeling neo-baroque and art deco buildings. Developers have tended to head out of the crowded city to build luxury apartments and villas. While that boom in high-end homes has stalled, the neglected center, home to the stock exchange and many banks, has been attracting growing interest. Cairo needs to re-energize its city center. It needs to be cleaned up, it needs to be renovated, Beltone s Chief Executive Aladdin Saba said late on Tuesday, announcing plans to raise cash of LE 450 million ($80 million). The cash will be used to purchase buildings in addition to the 18 Beltone has already bought using a fund that now has paid-in capital of LE 308 million. Beltone s Saba said his firm was performing due diligence on 11 buildings, in addition to the 18 it now has. We are doing another round of capital raising. We re going to keep raising capital to acquire new buildings as much as we can to cover the whole area. he said. Downtown has yet to suffer any significant collapse, rather it has suffered from a slow decline. As Egypt's population boomed and the city became overrun, officials at the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development told Daily News Egypt, much of the wealth that had accumulated along the historic streets of the city center fled for compounds in Sixth of October city and New Cairo. The result is that downtown has become filled with low and middle-end retail shopping that has failed, merchants say, to attract the kind of tourism that drives much of the Egyptian economy. Furthermore, with the American University in Cairo moving to its new campus, downtown lost a small but critical constituency of high net-worth individuals. Mahmoud Abdallah, chairman of the holding company, said on Monday he was ready to spend millions of pounds to upgrade the area once the government approved a draft plan. I have been asked by the (Cairo) governor to give a vision to the board, and I m going to do that next month, he said. If it is accepted, then we ll go right away and finance the infrastructure for a pedestrian (district), added Abdallah, whose holding company owns 70 of the buildings in the area. Beltone isn't alone in its efforts to revitalize downtown. The Insurance Holding Company, which is state owned, is pursuing a plan to turn a number of streets in downtown into pedestrian only roads. The move, especially if coupled with strong retail shopping options, might serve to revitalize a faltering neighborhood. The eclectic district of neo-baroque, neo-classical and art deco buildings was laid out by city planners commissioned from France in the 1860s, at the time the Suez Canal was being excavated and when Egypt was flush with cash from a cotton boom. -Additional reporting by Alastair Sharp and Daily News Egypt's Theodore May.
