Egypt’s cabinet selects winning consortium for 6 October-new capital monorail
CABINET WATCH- Cabinet has selected the winning consortium for the 6 October-new capital monorail, but hasn’t said who: The Madbouly Cabinet has chosen the winning consortium in a government tender to build two high-speed monorail lines that will link the new administrative capital to 6 October, according to a statement out following cabinet’s weekly meeting. The statement did not announce the name of the winning consortium. As we noted last December, the bidders are believed to have included:
- Military Production Ministry, bidding with Malaysia’s Scomi Group and the UAE’s Arabtec;
- Orascom Construction, bidding with Arab Contractors and Canada’s Bombardier;
- China Railway Construction Corporation (CRCC), bidding with CRRC Corp and local contractors Concorde and Samco.
More news from yesterday’s meeting:
- Reparations for families displaced by the Aswan High Dam: The government has allocated two land plots of a combined size of 13.8k feddans in Aswan to the governorate for allocation to families that have received no reparations since the construction of the Aswan High Dam during the 1960s. Many Nubian families were dislodged from their ancestral land on the banks of Lake Nasser following the dam’s construction.
- Compromise on Sinai’s Nuweiba-Taba coastal strip: The cabinet has allowed the General Authority for Tourism Development to ink 63 usufruct contracts as part of “appropriate legal solutions” for land unlawfully claimed by tourism project operators in the coastal strip between Nuweiba and Taba in Sinai.
- Guidelines for electronic gov’t payments: The cabinet has greenlit a Finance Ministry request to publish a circular to government service providers regarding a recent decision to mandate all government transactions exceeding EGP 500 to be electronic.
- EGP 300 mn for “Decent Life” education support: Religious Endowments Minister Mohamed Gomaa announced allocating EGP 200 mn to “impoverished villages” as part of President Abdel Fattah El Sisi’s Decent Life initiative, as well as EGP 100 mn in funding to the Education Support Fund.