Egypt: More than $25bn transferred abroad in less than a month

On Tuesday, Egyptian Prime Minister, Mostafa Madbouly, said that the government has adopted a policy of asking importers to obtain letters of credit to access foreign exchange. It was applied last March to prevent the dollar from being transferred after flows of more than 25 billion dollars were transferred in less than a month.

During the current economic conference, Madbouly said that the government sought to restrict the dollar’s outflow from the market to maintain the stability of the State.

In his speech on the first day of the conference on Sunday, the Prime Minister pledged to work on canceling the letters of credit for imports and to listen to the opinions of experts to come out of the conference with a clear vision of the crisis facing Egypt at the current stage.

Last February, the Central Bank of Egypt issued a decision to stop dealing with collection documents in the implementation of all import operations and to limit the work to letters of credit only, as of the beginning of March, to control the price of the dollar against the Egyptian pound by limiting the import operations.

The decision led to the disappearance of hundreds of goods from the shelves in shops and commercial companies, and the scarcity of raw materials as a result of import restrictions.