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Cairo: Egyptian billionaire Ebrahim Kamel plans to build a $500 million seaside resort near the World War II battlefield of Al Alamein that will compete with Red Sea vacation sites in Egypt.
Kamel said his Kato Group will construct 4,000 hotel rooms, a golf course, mall and entertainment complex in Ghazala Bay on the Mediterranean within five years. Kamel, who is also chairman of Egypt's second-largest publicly traded hotel company, built a $45 million airport at Al Alamein, a few kilometres from the resort, in 2005.
Egypt's Mediterranean coast provides about 500 kilometres of beaches, mostly undeveloped. Emaar Properties, the biggest publicly traded real-estate developer in the Middle East, is investing $1.7 billion in a resort a few miles from the Kamel site. The Red Sea is the main tourist destination, luring more than half of Egypt's 11 million visitors each year.
"The Mediterranean is moving toward attracting international tourists," said Esmail Sadek, an analyst at Beltone Financial, a Cairo-based investment bank. "It's been dominated by domestic tourism."
Egypt received 9.7 million tourists in the first 10 months of 2007, an increase of 13 per cent on the same period, according to the tourist ministry.
"There is so much to be done," Kamel said. "We will soon have the capacity to attract up to 50 million tourists a year."
Kato is building the resort in Ghazala to cut travel time for tourists from Europe. Al Alamein is where British forces defeated General Irwin Rommel's Afrika Korps in 1942.
The fighting, between General Bernard Montgomery's 8th Army and Rommel's divisions, began along a German defence line stretching some five miles inland from the sea.
Senior figure
Kamel, a former academic and a member of the country's ruling National Democratic Party, is chairman of Egyptian for Tourism Resorts. Kato Group has investments in the leisure and agriculture industries.
Shares of Egyptian for Tourism increased 1.5 per cent to 8.55 Egyptian pounds, valuing the company at 7.2 billion pounds ($1.3 billion).
"There is a lot of demand for real estate from the Middle East and this will cushion any declines from the West," Kamel said. "Egyptian for Tourism plans to expand its activities beyond the Red Sea coast in Egypt."
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