Madbouly made his comments at the cabinet summer headquarters in New Alamein city during a discussion with Coptic expat youths attending the third edition of Logos Coptic Youth Forum 2022.
The event was attended by Pope Tawadros II of Alexandria, the Pope of the Coptic Orthodox Church, the Minister of Emigration and Expatriates Affairs Soha Gendy, and top church officials.
On Thursday, Madbouly stressed in a meeting with Executive Director at the IMF Mahmoud Mohieldin, attended by the Acting Governor of the Central Bank of Egypt (CBE) Hassan Abdallah, that the main priorities of the government in the current period are to guarantee the stability of the economy and reduce the negative impact of the global economic crisis.
Last March, Cairo requested the IMF’s assistance through a new loan programme in order to help the government face the severe repercussions of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict on the economy.
The IMF loan mission to Egypt said that it held "productive talks" with the Egyptian authorities after it completed its visit to the country, which ran from 26 June to 7 July.
However, the mission's report has not been scheduled yet by the IMF’s Executive Board for discussion.
In mid-July, President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi publicly called during an official visit to Germany on European leaders to urge the IMF to ease the measures for a possible loan in order to allow the country to face the challenges posed by the current global crisis.
The IMF maintained in July its projections for Egypt’s real GDP growth in 2022 at 5.9 percent, while revising them down to 4.8 percent in 2023, citing the negative repercussions of the war in Ukraine on the country’s tourism sector and inflationary pressures on food prices.
Since the start of the government's implementation of the IMF-backed economic reform programme in 2016, Egypt has secured three loans from the fund, including a $12 billion loan to execute the first wave of reforms (November 2016 - July 2019) under the Extended Fund Facility followed by two more separate loans totaling $8 billion in 2020 under the IMF’s Rapid Finance Facility and Stand-By Arrangement to tackle the harsh impacts of the pandemic.
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