Saudi Arabian financing is to revive the planned launch of a new current affairs channel by United Media Services, the media conglomerate majority owned by the Egyptian General Intelligence Service, sources told Mada Masr, after the project was suspended in May due to lack of funding.
The media project — which one source described as a major push toward highlighting Egypt’s efforts in hosting COP 27, the UN’s international climate change conference scheduled for November — ran into difficulties when “sovereign authorities” ordered that it be suspended due to “funding issues,” said the sources in May.
Yet, after Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman paid a visit to Cairo on June 20, a well-informed source in the executive management of UMS told Mada Masr, a “funding breakthrough” facilitated the resumption of the project.
Egypt has run into major financial difficulties in the face of global inflation and investor uncertainty, exacerbated by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Since the beginning of the year, investors have pulled over US$20 billion — or the equivalent value of around half of the country’s foreign currency reserves — out of Egyptian equity markets, which had once boasted the highest real interest rate worldwide.
Saudi Arabia, along with Qatar and the UAE, have all contributed major sums in direct investments to supply Cairo’s urgent need for foreign currency.
During bin Salman’s visit, Egypt and Saudi Arabia signed 14 economic agreements worth US$7.7 billion, bringing the value of Saudi Arabia’s total portfolio in Egypt up to US$29 billion, making it one of the largest investors in the country.
Bilateral agreements concluded throughout June included some media production contracts — Saudi Media Minster Majid al-Qasabi and Supreme Media Regulatory Council head Karam Gabr signed an executive program agreement for bilateral media cooperation in press, radio, television, drama and digital media production.
The “funding breakthrough,” the UMS management source said, was the outcome of an agreement that took place on the sidelines of the Saudis’ visit. Alongside the headline meetings, side talks were being held between representatives of the GIS, in their capacity as owners of UMS, and prominent Saudi media figures from bin Salman’s delegation toward a revival of the financially stressed project of a regional media channel. According to the source, Egypt’s government views this project as a crucial tool that can highlight the country’s efforts during the upcoming climate summit, which is in turn “an opportunity to get past the current economic quagmire.”
As well as contributing funding, the Saudi Research and Media Group (SRMG) — the kingdom’s media arm that owns news platforms including Bloomberg Asharq Group and UK-based the Independent’s Arabic, Turkish and Urdu language outlets — is to gain a partial role in managing the new channels alongside UMS, their management source explained.
SRMG will establish the channels’ production plan, its operating system and high-quality broadcasting tools, and will develop the work crew’s training sessions, while UMS is expected to manage the financial structure of the workforce. The terms of the agreement are to come into effect as of August 2022, when construction of the channel’s Media Production City headquarters is set to be completed, the source added.
The hopes for a major Egyptian news project date back to over a year ago, when the head of UMS operations Hossam Saleh announced in a May presser a set of expansion plans that included setting up a regional news channel “to begin broadcasting in the first quarter of 2022.” The planned target audience of the channel, Saleh said at the time, are “Egyptians, Arabs, Arabic speakers within the coverage of Nilesat, as well as Arabic speakers in Europe, America, Canada and Australia via IPTV services.”
Work on launching the channels has been ongoing for some time, albeit with several hiccups, according to a source working in the program division of UMS channels.
An international news channel, to be named Cairo News, is being prepared for “launch in conjunction with the UN Climate Change Conference (COP27) in November.” A second regional news channel is in the cards as well, and the third will see the relaunch of UMS-owned Extra News as “Extra Hadath” in efforts to “build on the successes it achieved in the past period.”
With Saudi funds on board, UMS announced on July 6 that it would be launching the three news channels. The following week, vice-president of Extra News and editor-in-chief of the state-owned Rose al-Youssef newspaper Ahmed al-Tahri was appointed editor-in-chief of the emerging UMS news platform. A number of sources in the sector suggested that Tahri’s good reputation in Saudi Arabia was the likely reason for his appointment.
Writing by Ahmed Medhat