Mubarak Holds Ministerial Meeting on Suez Canal Expansion ProjectEgyptian President Hosni Mubarak held a ministerial meeting on Monday to review the enlargement project of the Suez Canal, the state-run MENA news agency reported.The Egyptian leader discussed with senior officials the progress of the expansion work, which was approved in August by Prime Minister Atef Obeid and started then. The 441-million-US-dollar project, financed entirely by Egypt itself, will increase the width of the canal from 345 meters to 400 meters and its depth from 22 meters to 25 meters. The three-stage expansion project, due to be finished by 2010, will allow the passage of 92 percent of the existing commercial ships in the world, including supertankers with a capacity of 200, 000 to 350,000 tons, the canal authority said. Canal revenues, one of Egypt's main sources of foreign currency, rose to 1.868 billion dollars in the 1999-2000 fiscal year, up 5.8 percent from the previous year, thanks largely to a boom in both global oil transportation and Southeastern Asian trade, the authority added. |
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