El Nasr Housing and Reconstruction appears to have accepted Emaar Misr’s offer to settle their dispute over land for Uptown Cairo, Public Enterprises Minister Khaled Badawy told the press yesterday, Al Mal reports. Badawy said state-owned El Nasr would have lost the international arbitration case it filed against Emaar last July. It’s claims are baseless, he suggested, as the property developer was not issued a full set of licenses to begin working on the project. El Nasr had claimed that Emaar failed to develop 3 mn sqm of land allotted to it back in 2005 and that there are 215k sqm of Uptown that are technically outside the project’s borders.

Reports emerged earlier this week claiming that El Nasr plans to proceed with the arbitration against Emaar, despite an earlier statement by a board member saying that El Nasr’s general assembly voted to accept Emaar’s EGP 100 mn settlement offer. Badawy said he pushed both sides to come to an out-of-court settlement. We suspect the case also came up during an Ismail Cabinet meeting on Tuesday that dove into lingering high-profile disputes between the state and investors.