Egypt’s House of Representatives gave final approval on Tuesday to a government-drafted bill regulating the Future of Egypt Authority for Sustainable Development, sending it to President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi for ratification, despite warnings that it grants the body an alarming concentration of regulatory and commercial power.
The bill had already drawn fire in its initial draft. Critics said it entrenched the authority’s expanding remit by combining conflicting functions—planning, licensing, land allocation, investment and the imposition of financial penalties—under a single roof, making it both regulator and operator of the same activities.
This arrangement, according to a policy paper from the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR), opens the door to extensive conflicts of interest.
The original draft also proposed exempting the authority, along with its planned sovereign and service funds, from the laws that govern the rest of the Egyptian state: the Civil Service Law, the Government Procurement Law, and the public sector wage cap.
Critics argued the carve-outs would shield the authority’s financial and contractual dealings from independent scrutiny, undercutting basic principles of transparency and institutional governance.
In light of these and other criticisms, discussions of the bill within the House’s Legislative Committee were contentious and resulted in substantial amendments to the government’s original draft, while opposition parties maintained strong reservations over the exceptional and extensive privileges the bill grants the authority.
By the government’s account, the bill transforms the authority into a special economic body reporting directly to the presidency, with broad powers over state assets, the creation of “sustainable development zones”, and two new funds—Nile Pyramids and Daem—designed to accelerate national projects and deepen partnerships with the private sector.
However, not everyone was persuaded. Irene Saeed, an MP and head of the Reform and Development Party’s parliamentary bloc, was among the sharpest critics during committee discussions.
The powers granted to the authority, she said, begin with the right to demand data from across government, extend to running development zones that carry tax and customs exemptions, and culminate in the power to issue licenses and execute projects outright.
“This expansion of powers fatally undermines the principle of competitive neutrality,” Saeed told Al Manassa in earlier remarks. “It contradicts the law’s stated objective of attracting more foreign investment.”
The authority’s chief, Colonel Bahaa El Ghannam, rejected such concerns when he defended the bill before the plenary session on Tuesday. The legislation, he insisted, does not hand the authority any new jurisdiction over land controlled by other government bodies; it merely regulates and improves management of land already under its control.
Speaking in remarks cited by Al-Masry Al-Youm, El Ghannam said the bill had been carefully drafted to address the present situation without infringing on other entities’ powers, and that it complied fully with the constitutional and legal framework governing land jurisdiction.
Maha Abdel Nasser, an MP for the Egyptian Social Democratic Party, argued that genuine sustainable development lay in reforming existing state institutions rather than multiplying parallel investment bodies.
She acknowledged the bureaucratic dysfunction that tempts officials toward creating new entities as a shortcut, but insisted the real fix was addressing the shortcomings within the state’s own institutional structure, rather than “bypassing it by creating alternative tracks.”
Despite amendments introduced by the joint parliamentary committee, Abdel Nasser told the plenary session that a full reading of the final text left her convinced that “rejecting the bill in its entirety remains the most appropriate and deserved decision for the country at this stage.”
The EIPR’s policy paper closes with a set of proposed safeguards: publication of the decree establishing the authority and all prior decisions and agreements transferring assets and land to it; a clear definition of the authority’s scope written into the legislation itself, rather than left to future government decisions; a strict separation between its regulatory and licensing functions on one side and its investment and operational functions on the other; and full public financial oversight, including published financial statements, performance reports and Central Auditing Organization findings submitted regularly to the House of Representatives.
