With foreign currency in short supply in Egypt, Rafik Clovis spent December anxiously waiting to find out whether his bank would be able to provide the $67,000 he needed to fund the import of a consignment of car parts from Europe.
But by the end of the year, the dollars were still not available; as a result, his imports in 2022 were just a tenth of a normal year’s amount.
“Conditions are catastrophic,” Clovis said. “There are no dollars and I have no idea how it will be resolved. I have five employees, and now we are surviving off what we made in previous years.”
The importer’s predicament is shared by many businesses as Egypt struggles with a foreign currency crunch. The first three weeks of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February led to $20bn of outflows from the Arab world’s most populous country as foreign portfolio investors rushed to safe havens.
Despite $13bn in deposits from the United Arab…
