British International Investment (BII) says it will expand its Egypt portfolio, but its call for a “level playing field” points to the unresolved role of state-backed firms in the economy.
BII, the UK government’s main development finance institution, plans to expand its investments in Egypt but says Cairo needs to do more to give private companies room to compete with state-owned and military-linked entities if it wants to unlock more capital, the institution’s chief executive told Reuters.
CEO Leslie Maasdorp said during a visit to Cairo last week that Egypt is BII’s largest exposure in Africa “by design,” with the institution currently holding 850 million British Pounds (around $1.1 billion) in private sector investments in the country.
“We will increase our investment activity in Egypt,” Maasdorp said, without setting a specific target. He added that further investment would depend on the availability of viable opportunities.
The remarks align BII with one of the central conditions of Egypt’s IMF-backed reform program that the state reduces its role in the economy and creates more space for private-sector competition.
Asked which single measure would most help Egypt attract investment, Maasdorp pointed to private sector reform.
“Leveling the playing field, if you ask me to identify one intervention, it could be that one,” he said.
BII, which invests only in the private sector, has directed much of its Egypt portfolio toward climate finance. Its previous commitments include more than $300 million for a 1.1-gigawatt wind farm in the Gulf of Suez and financing for a solar and battery storage project with Norway’s Scatec.
In a previous announcement, BII described Egypt as its largest African market by portfolio value and said its cumulative commitments in the country had approached $1.3 billion since 2012.
Maasdorp praised Egypt’s exchange rate liberalization as a durable structural shift, while making clear that investor confidence also depends on the harder political-economy question of state competition.
That question has run through Egypt’s negotiations with the IMF for years. The Fund’s most recent review said macroeconomic stabilization had become more entrenched, but that progress on deeper structural reforms remained uneven. It said efforts to reduce the state’s footprint, especially military involvement in the civilian economy and the divestment program, had been slower than expected.
For development lenders such as BII, Egypt offers scale, infrastructure needs, and a large domestic market. But Maasdorp’s remarks suggest that foreign capital is still reading reform through a narrower lens of whether private investors can compete on terms not shaped by the privileges of state ownership.
Egyptian officials have repeatedly framed private sector empowerment as a priority.
The issue for lenders, however, is not whether Egypt has adopted the language of private sector reform, but whether the state is prepared to retreat from the economy for that language to become material.
