The secretary general of the Presidential Elections Commission (PEC), Hamdan Fahmy, stated that the reasons behind the delay of the presidential elections were technical and are not attributed to waiting for a specific presidential candidate.

"The committe does not work according to the circumstances of a specific presidential candidate and for him to sort out his issues " Fahmy told Saudi Newspaper Al Sharq Al Aswat on Friday, hinting at the potential presidential candidacy of Field Marshal Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi.

The secretary general of the committee also stated that the delay in announcing the date of the upcoming presidential elections is in part due to training issues.

"The committee is currently working on training the employees of public notary offices on documenting the forums of citizen endorsements on e-reader devices correctly." Judge Hamdan Fahmy explained that training will continue until Sunday 23 March.

"We are going to look into setting the date of the presidential elections and candidacy starting next Wednesday 26 March," he added.

Fahmy stated that according to the presidential elections law, each presidential candidate needs at least 25,000 citizen endorsements support his candidacy bid. The endorsements must come from at least 15 governorates with at least 1000 endorsements per governorate.

He also added that according to the bylaws, the Presidential Elections Commission would receive candidacy requests for a period of time between 10 and 30 days. "At the end of this period, the commission will announce the names of the potential candidates, followed by two days dedicated to accepting objections, and finally studying those objections in order to finalise the list of presidential candidates" he concluded.