Egypt's domestic debt exceeds $208.6bn

Egypt's total domestic debt has reached 1.460 trillion Egyptian pounds (about 208.6 billion U.S. dollars) in March 2013, state-run news agency MENA citing a report from the Central Bank of Egypt (CBE). The CBE report said that 82.9 percent of the debt is owed by the government, 4.4 percent by public economic institutions and 12. 7 percent by the state-owned National Investment Bank. According the report, the total domestic debt owed by the government increased by 220.7 billion pounds (about 31.5 billion dollars) to reach 1.211 trillion pounds (173 billion dollars) during the period between July 2012 and March 2013 of the 2012- 2013 fiscal year. Egypt has been suffering a sharp economic recession since the ouster of ex-president Hosni Mubarak in early 2011. The general budget deficit exceeded 29 billion dollars, or 11.8 percent of the GDP, over the past 11 months, the Finance Ministry reported on June 20. Further, the foreign reserves was down from 16.04 billion dollars in May to 14.9 billion dollars at the end of June, the CBE said in a previous report. Egypt's foreign reserves stood at about 36 billion dollars in January 2011, right before the outbreak of the massive protests that ousted Mubarak, and have been on a drastic decline since then.