Guardian: Egyptian president asks Hisham Kandil to form government

[alqadhi]

The Egyptian president, Mohamed Morsi, has asked Hisham Kandil, a relatively young water minister little known outside the country, to form a new government, disappointing investors who had hoped for a high-profile economist.

Kandil was a senior bureaucrat in the ministry until he was appointed minister last July after the fall of Hosni Mubarak. He obtained a doctorate in irrigation from the University of North Carolina in the US in 1993, according to the ministry's Facebook page.

A spokesman for Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood politician who was sworn in as Egypt's first freely elected president on 30 June, described Kandil as an "independent patriot" who had not belonged to a party either before or after the uprising against Mubarak, according to the state news agency.

Kandil has denied being affiliated to any Islamist group, but told al-Jazeera in an interview last year he had grown a beard out of a sense of religious duty.

Kandil did not feature on the long list of potential candidates for prime minister circulated by Egyptian media in the three weeks since Morsi took office. The speculation had focused on a group of economists including past and present central bank officials.

Egypt's benchmark share index, which was trading flat before the announcement, fell 0.7%. "This is quite a surprise as most of the names put around had been from the financial sector. The market is definitely reacting negatively," said Mohamed Radwan, at Pharos Securities.

Egypt risks a budget and balance of payments crisis unless it can secure urgent aid from foreign donors and lure back foreign investors who fled the country after last year's political upheaval. Kandil recently accompanied Morsi to an African Union summit in Addis Ababa.



شاهد المحتوى الأصلي علي بوابة الفجر الاليكترونية - Guardian: Egyptian president asks Hisham Kandil to form government

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