Egyptian military expands control over economy

The Egyptian armed forces have expanded their control over the country’s economy since the 2011 revolution having won bids of major projects worth billions of Egyptian pounds, Al-Araby Al-Jadid has reported.

Much about the Egyptian military’s role in the economy is unknown, the Washington Post noted in a report published early last year. Its budget is secret, and its industries are unaudited and untaxed.

Economic experts estimate the military’s holdings at anywhere between five and 60 per cent of the economy.

The local Egyptian media have reported that at least six major infrastructure contracts for roads, bridges, tunnels and apartment blocks — worth more than $1.5 billion — went to the military between September and December 2013.

In March 2014, Egyptian president Abdul-Fattah Al-Sisi signed a $40 billion deal with Emirati construction giant Arabtec to launch a project to build a million homes for “Egypt’s youth”.

However, in his electoral campaign Sisi denied that the armed forces control the major part of the Egyptian economy.

Since the January 2011 revolution and during the rule of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), General Mohamed Nassr, the deputy defence minister for financial issues, said that the armed forces have built up their projects on their own.

An earlier report for the central accounting bureau showed that the economic activities of the Egyptian armed forces increased from 11 million Egyptian pounds in 1979 to 644 million in 1990, to 3.6 billion in 2011. The total revenues between 1990 and 2011 reached 7.7 billion Egyptian pounds.

In addition to such economic projects, the army is considered the main owner of land in Egypt, as reported by Reuters in a report issued in 2012. According to the report, Egypt’s land planning authority says that the armed forces have de facto control over all unused land in Egypt – about 87 per cent of the country.

Economic expert Mohamed Atallah told Al-Araby Al-Jadid that the proportion of the national economy governed by the armed forces is unknown. He reiterated that the army’s overt economy, which has recently begun to surface in deals such as that with Falcon for Security Services, is likely to be much greater than it appears.

According to Attalah, the army also owns bakeries and has franchises on several major roads and bridges, including the revenues of Shubra-Banha road, as well as gaining income from the maintenance of 27 bridges and tunnels nationwide.