Governmental sources said that the Ministry of Investment is preparing a new investment law to substitute the Investment Guarantees and Incentives Law no.17 of 2015. The law is based on the demands of a large number of investors who participated in a poll recently posed by the General Authority for Investments and Free Zones (GAFI).
The sources said that, according to the survey, investors were more in favour of passing a new law, instead of amending the law that was passed before the Egypt Economic Development Conference in March 2015.
The sources added that the Ministry of Investment will announce the result of the poll by the end of the month. Minister of Investment Dalia Khorshid and chief executive of GAFI Mohammed Khudair will start holding meetings with all the business community to discuss the poll results by the beginning of October.
The sources explained that the ministry will hold discussions with all the business community, to present them with the ministry’s new law proposal before submitting it to the concerned authorities, namely the cabinet and the parliament.
The Ministry of Investment held meetings with 500 investors before hosting the poll on GAFI’s website, in order to extract the most prominent law amendments that investors desired. The meetings resulted in the decision to conduct a survey so as to determine the continuity or abolition of the law.
The sources pointed out that the Ministry of Investment’s poll was available on the website in Arabic and English, and the ministry sent it to all businessmen associations, industry federations, chambers of commerce, and investors, in order to include all opinions.
The Ministry of Investment is entitled to make urgent amendments to the existing Law no. 17, until the issuance of a new law or the amendment of the existing one. One of the amendments is for the free zones system to be reinstated.
In a previous interview with Daily News Egypt, Khudair stated that GAFI’s deadline to resolve the investment law problems is in six months.
He added that GAFI is currently working according to Law no. 17 of 2015 until its amendment. GAFI is responsible for all legal tasks related to land allocation, and has allocated 139 plots of lands during the past two months. GAFI targets to increase them to 400 plots by the end of October, in cooperation with all authorities involved in land ownership.
