The finance ministry’s General Authority of Government Services is preparing bidding terms for a public auction of 37,000 feddans of state-recovered land in Wadi Al-Natroun, Authority president and member of the committee to recover looted state lands Ayman Gohar said in a statement.

The offered plots of land will be announced on the websites of the finance ministry, the General Authority of Government Services and the Government Procurement Portal.

The date of the auction has not yet been determined.

The committee first announced in April that it would soon start offering the recovered lands in public auctions in order to incorporate them into the government’s development plans.

Egyptian president Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi formed in February the committee to recover looted state lands, headed by former prime minister Ibrahim Mahlab, the president’s advisor for national and strategic projects.

The committee is tasked with creating an inventory and recovering state lands.

Recovery is done through reconciliation by legalizing the status of the lands belonging to the agriculture ministry’s General Authority for Reconstruction Projects and Land Reclamation or by taking back the land if it had not been used.

In addition, the committee is responsible for protecting lands from being looted again by offering them in public auctions.

The committee includes the minister of local development, the president’s aide for security affairs and counter-terrorism, representatives from the justice, defence and finance ministries, and Egypt's general intelligence.