The House of Representatives’ Industry Committee plans to summon the Minister of Industry and Foreign Trade Tarik Qabil in May to discuss obstacles facing the sector.
The specialised parliamentary committee also plans to invite Minister of Investment Dalia Khorshid and Minister of Environment Khaled Fahmy to the meeting, according to the head of the committee, Mohamed Saad Badrawi.
The committee will address the forestalled activation of the one-stop-shop system and the small- and medium-sized enterprises’ (SME) credit portfolio. At the beginning of 2016, President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi announced an initiative to secure EGP 200bn for the sector at a nominal interest rate of 5%.
The commission plans to amend law No. 17/2015, known as the Unified Investment Law, as several of its legal texts are now outdated, according to the head of the committee.
The Industry Committee also called for the consolidation of the sector’s oversight under the Industrial Development Authority. Reducing bureaucratic inefficiencies, the authority would supervise land offerings and development projects.
Centralised control would help to reduce the operational burdens on Egypt’s many stalled factories, according to Badrawi. Factories have long struggled to navigate between the demands of the administrative authorities and the banking sector.
“Solving the stalled factories problem requires presence on the ground and not just statements from officials, as solving it will contribute to increasing dollar proceeds from non-oil exports,” he said.
Non-oil exports generated $18.5bn in revenue in 2015, falling 16.4% compared to the previous year. The industrial sector is still suffering from the erosion of foreign currency holdings as it struggle to be able to buy its needed supply of raw materials, according to Badrawi.
Industrial manufacturers have not been able to open lines of credit for the purchase of raw materials, causing production to falter and the sector’s growth to stall. The Industrial Committee plans to issue bylaws for the Mineral Resources and Mines Law.
