Four companies are competing for a contract of Egyptian Steel's plant in Ein Sokhna. The bidding companies are Orascom Construction Industries (OCI), Petrojet, Hassan Allam Sons and SIAC, chairman of Egyptian Steel, Ahmed Abou Hashima, said on Wednesday. The winner of the EGP 220 million bid will be announced within the coming two weeks, said Abou Hashima. The steel company has already signed a contract with Hassan Allam sons to build a plant in Beni Suef, 70 per cent of the new plant's production will be consumed in the local market, while the remaining 30 per cent will be exported, said the chairman of the company who expected that his factories will control 20 per cent of the market, with a gross production value of 2 million tones. OCI Investor Relations Manager Omar Darwazah, refrained from commenting on the bid. He said as a publicly traded company, OCI's policy is not to comment on the ongoing bids they have applied for and that they are waiting for the result. In 2007, OCI sold its entire stake in Orascom Building Materials Holding to the French company Lafarge at 8.8 billion euro. In his 6 October speech President Mohamed Morsy insinuated that the state has over EGP 100 billion dues from five companies. On the Lafarge deal, Darwazah confirmed that in Egypt there are no taxes on the capital gains and that his company welcomed the statement by the prime minister that no retroactive taxes will be applied, and thus they will not pay any additional tax dues for selling their company to Lafarge. OCI's official also spoke about the company's projects in Iraq and Saudi Arabia; he said that in February his company won a $363 million contract in Iraq to construct a power plant, and that they are actually looking at other projects in the domain of infrastructure, electricity and hospitals. “Iraq is a very important market to us” he added. Orascom was recently awarded a EGP 532 million contract to construct a new airfield at the Hurghada International Airport, the contract that was awarded by the Egyptian Airports Company (EAC) includes “the construction of a complete airfield composed of a four kilometer long runway, a four kilometer long taxiway, connecting taxiways, and all airfield lighting, power supply, and storm water drainage systems. The project is scheduled for completion in 26 months,” said the company's website.
