CEO of leading car manufacturing firm Ghabbour Group, Raouf Ghabbour, called to cancel all monetary policy decisions taken by the Central Bank of Egypt (CBE) after February.
In a workshop organised by N Gage Consulting and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), Ghabbour crticised former CBE governor Hisham Ramez, blaming him for exacerbating the dollar crises.
According to Ghabbour, the current value of the Egyptian pound is highly overvalued.
Instead of gradually decreasing the value of the Egyptian pound, Ghabbour calls for an immediate decrease of its value “because the reduction will be done anyway in the official market”.
He advised new CBE governor Tarek Amer to increase interest rates to curb the dollarisation issue, and to meet with exchange companies “and treat them as partners”.
Amer’s first action to allocate US dollars to the market affected Ghabbour positively. “During Ramez’s last days in his position, I was close to buying $1 at EGP 10,” he said.
Ghabbour said the CBE should give priority to the industrial sector, not the food and medical sectors, in terms of selling foreign currency “because this policy has led to an economic collapse”. He said he believes the foreign currency crunch is a short-term crisis.
His company obtained $27.5m from the latest CBE dollar auctions.
