New banking supervision programme with the Central Bank of Egypt

Today in Cairo Mr Jean-Claude Trichet, President of the European Central Bank (ECB), and Dr Farouk El Okdah, Governor of the Central Bank of Egypt (CBE), signed a Memorandum of Understanding which will intensify the cooperation between the two institutions, ahead of the start of a new programme of technical assistance on 1 January 2009.

The aim of the programme is to gradually strengthen banking supervision in Egypt towards basic Basel II compliance, in line with the strategy devised by the Central Bank of Egypt. In order to achieve this, it is vital that, over the next three years, the banking community of Egypt actively contributes to the efforts of the Central Bank of Egypt.

As was the case for the previous programme of technical assistance between 2005 and 2007, the European Commission will finance this new programme, in the framework of the cooperation between Egypt and the European Union. To this end, Mrs Fayza Abu El Naga, Egyptian Minister for International Cooperation, and Dr Klaus Ebermann, Head of the Delegation of the European Commission to Egypt, witnessed the signing of the Memorandum of Understanding and signed a declaration committing to undertake all necessary preparations by the end of the year.

The programme will involve the ECB in partnership with the central banks of Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Germany, Greece, France, Italy and Romania. In order to implement the programme, the ECB and the partner national central banks will dispatch a Resident Programme Coordinator to Cairo and pay regular expert visits to the Central Bank of Egypt for a period of three years, starting on 1 January 2009.