If you’re anything like us, you’re recovering from the first long weekend of Sahel, a transatlantic flight and / or the reintroduction of ethanolic beverages in your diet — and could probably do with a reminder of where we left off last week. Among the issues of broad importance making headlines before the Eid:

• Egypt repaid debt to both Qatar and the Paris Club totaling more than USD 1.7 bn and there was speculation we may have opened informal talks with the IMF on a facility of as much as USD 10 bn.
• Industry was worried EGAS will cut natural gas supplies to manufacturers for the coming two month as we pass through high demand season for electricity.
• Mobile network operators faced the specter of foreign competition if they don’t take the 4G licenses on offer (and, of course, if there’s a foreign player out there interested in our market). The industry continues to bemoan the lack of FX, to fret about repatriation of funds and jockey for position, particularly over the fate of Telecom Egypt’s stake in Vodafone Egypt.
• Bank managing directors found they could still face term limits, Central Bank of Egypt Governor Tarek Amer suggested, setting up continued conflict between industry and private-sector institutions despite a court ruling against the earlier imposition of the nine-year limit.
• We seemed to be on the verge of a mini-IPO boomlet, with CIB’s CI Capital being the most recent to be rumored to want to file. We’ll have an updated IPO tracker for you soon.
• And Beltone Financial said it is suing the heads of the Egyptian Financial Supervisory Authority and the EGX, claiming it was being unfairly treated.