Egypt strikes expanded $8bn deal with the IMF

The deal comes as the central bank said it would let the Egyptian pound trade freely.
Egypt has signed an expanded $8bn deal with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Egypt’s Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly has said. The new agreement announced on Wednesday is an expansion of the $3bn, 46-month Extended Fund Facility that the IMF struck with Egypt back in December 2022, which was predicated on the shift to a more flexible exchange-rate system.
The deal comes as the central bank said it would let the pound currency trade freely and announced an interest-rate hike of 600 basis points in a bid to stabilise the economy.
As part of the new deal, Egypt will also receive a loan of about $1.2bn from a separate facility that promotes environmental sustainability, Madbouly said. The December 2022 programme had stalled when Egypt reverted to keeping its pound at a tightly managed rate, and amid delays to an ambitious programme to divest state assets and boost the role of the private sector.
The IMF deal comes less than two weeks after Egypt announced a deal with the Emirati sovereign wealth fund ADQ that it said would deliver $35bn in investments by late April…Source:aljazeera.com