The first phase will be built on 10,500 acres of land and will include a business and finance center, an exhibition fair city and residential units.
Assistant to the Housing Minister Khaled Abbas said that the land on offer started from plots of 50 to 500 acres, according to a report in Zawya.
Among the conditions set by the government is a down payment of 20% of the value of the land up to 150 acres and 15% if the area is larger. Insurance worth approximately $938,000 should be paid for spaces up to 60 acres, $1.56 million for spaces up to 200 acres and $2.5 million for larger spaces.
The conditions also stipulate that all companies bidding for the project should not include a government official as a founder and also that projects and units should be executed in a period of between 3-5 years depending on the size of land under development.
It is not yet evident which and how many companies have bid to take part in the first phase.
The first phase also includes some residential units which are already being constructed and will be available for citizens starting April.
The announcement of the conditions attached to land in the new capital city in the first phase came a few days after a Chinese company withdrew from the project over price disagreements with the government.
The Chinese withdrawal is the second to hit the project after UAE developer, Capital City Partners, originally meant to lead it, also quit.
Two Chinese state construction companies, China State Construction Engineering Corporation (CSCEC) and China Fortune Land Development Company (CFLD), then stepped in.
CSCEC had secured a $3 billion loan in order to build government facilities for the new city, but no final agreement had been reached, the Housing Ministry said in a statement last week.
Egyptian contractors will now be responsible for building the government facilities, said Ayman Ismail, chairman of the company developing the new city, which is jointly owned by the Housing Ministry and the Armed Forces’ Engineering Authority.
An official source told Al-Mal newspaper last week that 12 Egyptian companies would take over the building of the government facilities in the new city. He said the task had been delegated to a number of companies to speed up the construction process.
The source added that the contracts stipulate that the execution period is 18 months, saying that the companies were likely to finish the work during only one year, with the aim of finishing the whole project by H1 2018.
A memorandum of understanding worth $20 billion with CFLD was meant to be signed in December, but this has not yet materialized, Hisham Sheta, Chairman of Income, a local partner in the project, told Reuters. He expected the deal to be signed within 6 months.
The new capital city project is one of President Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi’s mega-projects that aims to kick-start Egypt’s economy. It was announced during the Egypt Economic Development Conference in March 2015 and was proposed as a way to alleviate congestion in Cairo, which is expected to grow from 18 to 40 million people by 2050.
Dubbed as Egypt’s administrative capital, the new city will be built over 700 sq km east of Cairo between Greater Cairo and the Red Sea and will be executed within 5-7 years at a cost of $45 billion.
ALAhram Weekly
20 February
