A day late and a USD short, Hona Al Assema’s Lamees Al Hadidy reviewed the main highlights of the IMF’s staff report on Egypt’s USD 12 bn facility. CI Capital’s Hany Farahat told Lamees in a call that he saw the statements of the IMF chief of mission in Egypt Chris Jarvis as “reassuring,” as they conveyed a message the EGP will appreciate in the next few months. The analyst reserved particular praise for the report’s recommendation of subsidies reduction, especially considering the Zohr field coming online this year. Farahat wants the CBE to cancel the cap on USD deposits before June. He appears to be not in favor of reinstating a stamp tax on stock market transactions (watch: runtime: 8:09).

After discussing how the report doesn’t do much by way of recommending a comprehensive investment strategy, Lamees channeled her inner Fidel Castro. She went on a tirade of how the facility would severely hurt the middle class and that she doesn’t see a way out. The government should have been tougher on the IMF, she suggested, and drawn a red-line at social harmony (watch; runtime: 4:44). We wonder what other bright back up plans she had cooking up. Lamees once again demonstrated how useless our MPs are when she interviewed the House Economics Committee Chairman Ali Moselhy who moaned to her that they still have not received a copy of the IMF report from the Ministry of Finance. He used that as an excuse as to why he couldn’t take part of the weekend to read it.

Al Hadidy also spoke with the House Housing Committee chair Alaa Waly on the Contractor’s Compensation Act. The House is slightly amending the draft and will be finalized this week (watch; runtime: 37:53).

Yahduth Fi Masr’s Sherif Amer focused on the upcoming cabinet reshuffle, where sources told him that it will encompass from nine to 11 ministries, including the Ministry of Interior. Sources added that the shuffle will see the merger of the ministries of tourism and civil aviation into one ministry, and the merger of the ministries of manpower and immigration.
Amr Adib began last night’s Kol Youm episode from the studios of On TV’s news channel On Live, which will officially launch on Monday (watch; runtime: 25:40), segueing into a diatribe about how banks need to treat their customers better when they deposit USD instead of giving them the third degree (watch; runtime: 2:11). We would like to point Adib to our archives page and invite him to read our issues for the past 14 months to get an understanding of why banks have been acting stringently.