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Sovereign wealth funds from Abu Dhabi and Qatar are among those pouring billions into Egypt’s north coast

A few decades ago, a traveller heading west from Alexandria on Egypt’s Mediterranean coast would have driven through desert fringed by a turquoise sea, occasional Bedouin stone houses and memorials to British, Italian and German soldiers killed in the second world war — before reaching the first town, Marsa Matruh, some 260km away.

The coast has since then become a popular summer holiday spot for well-off Egyptians, home to gated communities whose exorbitant prices have earned its expensive western stretch the nickname the “evil coast”.

But the region is now on the brink of what developers, mostly from the Gulf, hope will be a far greater transformation — one that will turn it from a domestic destination with a brief seasonal window into an international hub attracting foreign property buyers and tourists.

Sovereign wealth funds from Abu Dhabi and Qatar, along with Dubai-based developer Emaar, are among those pouring billions of dollars into mega-projects offering hotels, yacht marinas, malls, schools and healthcare. The Egyptian government has also invested heavily in roads, airports and New Alamein, intended for year-round living.

“The coming of the Gulf developers can be a game-changer,” said Omar El-Shenety, an Egyptian investment banker and managing partner at Zilla Capital. The developers “are very familiar names to Gulf citizens and they trust them. So, I expect them to become sizeable buyers.”

The Abu Dhabi and Qatari investments were widely seen by economists as bailouts aimed at shoring up Egypt’s heavily indebted finances and helping Cairo secure IMF loans.

Abu Dhabi in 2024 paid $35bn for development rights to 40,600 acres in Ras el-Hekma, roughly 1.7 times the size of Barcelona, in the largest foreign investment in Egypt’s history. Master developer Modon Holding said the site would include tourist facilities, a marina, airport, investment and free zones, and 310,000 homes for an eventual population of 2mn.

Qatari Diar, owned by Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund, followed in 2025 with a $30bn project to transform Alam al-Roum into a year-round luxury destination.

Egypt’s largest developer, Talaat Moustafa Group, partnered with the state on the $21bn SouthMED development, which was launched in 2024 with an English-language ad campaign fronted by actor Sylvester Stallone. TMG has promoted the site as “a new global destination rising on the Mediterranean”.

Construction and off-plan sales for the initial phases of all three mega-projects are already under way, but the risk is that such large urban projects do not go to plan. “There will always be some vulnerability to the economic and geopolitical risks of the region,” said Shenety.

“I would describe the north coast as a destination in transition rather than a fully mature international resort market,” said Moataz Sedky, general manager of Travco Holidays, a tourism company that owns nine hotels on the north coast.

While Egyptian destinations like Sharm el-Sheikh on the Red Sea and Luxor have long been popular with foreign visitors, the Mediterranean coast has catered almost exclusively to Egyptians.

But the region, Sedky said, was “beginning to see the emergence of two additional markets: visitors from the Gulf and international leisure tourists, particularly Europeans”.

The hope now, analysts say, is that the new mega-developments will change an economic model currently built around a brief summer season.

In June, upmarket restaurants and retailers open to serve holidaymakers, selling everything from outdoor furniture to golf carts for zipping around the compounds. But almost everything is mothballed by mid-September, when the visitors depart.

A glimpse of the region’s potential can be seen in Marassi, an upscale beach resort by Emaar. The meticulously landscaped palm-lined compound boasts a 6.5km seafront, 8,000 homes and 12 luxury hotels, where a night during peak summer can cost more than $1,000.

Its yacht marina is overlooked by a promenade lined with dozens of restaurants and high-end boutiques. On an August night, it was thronged with well-dressed crowds, including many Gulf visitors, waiting for tables at alfresco dining spots. The vibe was more Dubai than Egypt, without the stifling heat.

Ali, a Kuwaiti businessman dining with his children who did not want to give his full name, said he had not seen “cleaner and more beautiful beaches. We come for the swimming and we are in the sea from morning till evening.”

Hotel occupancy in Marassi in late August was 65 per cent non-Egyptian, almost exclusively from Gulf countries, said Mohamed Alabbar, the founder and managing director of Emaar. “This is what we were wishing for six years ago, because typically they are big spenders and stay for a long time.”

However, only 10 to 15 per cent of housing units were sold to Gulf citizens. “We’re just starting because it [the north coast] is not discovered yet. Even for us in the Gulf, we only learnt in the past 10 years about its incredible beauty and weather.”

Alabbar has been pushing to extend Marassi’s season beyond September. Three of the hotels operate year-round, and he has insisted shops in the marina remain open in October.

“I told them last year that if they stayed open, I wouldn’t charge them rent,” he said. “But I made it clear: if you don’t open, I won’t renew your lease. Everyone opened except for one retailer, and we are terminating his lease.”

The developments could benefit existing compounds. Ramla, a new resort on the doorstep of Modon’s Ras el-Hekma project, expects to gain from proximity to what it hopes will become a city with services, job opportunities and year-long occupancy, said Ahmed Badrawi, executive vice-chair of developer Marakez.

“As a relatively small resort community, we would get the benefits of a small compound plus all the advantages of being next door to a fully integrated city,” he said. 

North coast property sales reached over $10.4bn in 2025, making it the country’s second-biggest property investment destination after east Cairo, said Ahmed Zaki, managing director of advisory firm The Board Consulting.

To maintain the flow of visitors beyond beach season, Sedky said more hotels, year-round scheduled flights, restaurants, convention centres and sports facilities were needed.

“Hotel capacity remains a main constraint if international demand continues growing at the present rate,” he said, adding that some of winter would be suitable for sports, conferences and cultural tourism. “The mistake would be to assume a year-round destination must sell the same product in January as it does in July.”

Tourists visiting the coast were not far from Egypt’s more traditional attractions, Alabbar pointed out. “You can spend three or four days here, drive down to see the Pyramids and then come back.”

AkzoNobel to sell its SE Asia decorative paint unit to Nippon Paint

Dutch group on verge of handing Japanese rival a small victory as it seeks to exit non-core markets ahead of Axalta merger

Dulux owner AkzoNobel has agreed a deal to sell its south-east Asian decorative paints business to Nippon Paint for $1.35bn, handing its Japanese rival a small victory after previous attempts at larger deals failed.

Nippon announced the acquisition on Monday, confirming an earlier FT report. As part of the deal, Akzo will offload its decorative paints business best known for the Dulux brand in Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Singapore, as well as Papua New Guinea and Australia.

The disposal would follow through on an earlier pledge by AkzoNobel chief executive Grégoire Poux-Guillaume to withdraw from peripheral markets in south-east Asia where the company is not a market leader.

Poux-Guillaume is also working to complete AkzoNobel’s merger with US peer Axalta, announced in November, which would create a New York-listed paint and chemicals group with an enterprise value of about $25bn.

The south-east Asia divestment, which is unrelated to approval for the Axalta deal, comes after Nippon failed in previous attempts to pursue larger deals. These included a €7.5bn bid in July for all of AkzoNobel’s decorative paint business as well as a €13bn full takeover proposal in May alongside US peer Sherwin-Williams.

Nippon remains interested in a larger deal for the decorative paint business, according to people familiar with the matter. But they added that integration of the south-east Asia business could occupy the company for some time and that AkzoNobel does not have plans to sell further assets from the business.

Nippon’s deal for Akzo’s south-east Asia business is expected to close in mid-2027, Nippon said.

Shareholders in August approved the Akzo-Axalta combination, which will have a single listing in New York while maintaining dual headquarters in Amsterdam and Philadelphia. The combined company would have annual revenues of about $17bn, making it one of the world’s largest coatings groups.

AkzoNobel has previously flagged the possibility of selling the south-east Asian operations before completing the larger merger.

The company in 2025 agreed to sell its Indian business to local group JSW in a deal valued at about €1.4bn as part of its push to dispose of non-core assets.

Multiple Security Failures Allowed FlyDubai Pilot Into Cockpit

Authorities in three countries missed opportunities across the board; “there wasn’t proper vetting”

Authorities in three countries missed multiple opportunities to prevent a FlyDubai co-pilot from launching an in-flight attack on Flight 1073.

Oman banned Hamam al-Hammami from flying due to his radical views but did not flag its concerns more broadly before FlyDubai hired him.

Israel’s Transportation Ministry failed to vet the flight crew, saying it didn’t believe it had the authority or required expertise.

DUBAI—Before Hamam al-Hammami stood behind his captain on FlyDubai Flight 1073 and raised an emergency ax to begin the assault that nearly brought down the plane, there had been ample opportunity for authorities in three countries to keep him from getting anywhere near that cockpit.

Oman had scrutinized his online habits and decided he showed too much interest in radical ideology to trust as a pilot at state carrier Oman Air, where he worked. They banned him from flying, sent him to a deradicalization program and put him in a desk job but didn’t flag their concerns more broadly, people familiar with the matter said.

When FlyDubai hired him in February, it didn’t contact Oman to vet his experience. The company did do a criminal-background check, a person familiar with the process said. The airline later put him on the sensitive route to Tel Aviv, where he flew multiple times, people familiar with the matter said.

Emirati authorities are currently investigating FlyDubai staff who were involved in the hiring process, people familiar with the investigation said. FlyDubai said it wouldn’t comment while the investigation was ongoing.

Hamam al-Hammami in a pilot uniform.

A photo from Hamam al-Hammami’s deleted LinkedIn profile.

The last chance to stop him before the airport came in Israel. It was a low bar—pilots from countries like Oman that don’t have diplomatic relations are barred from flying to the country, so Hammami should have been stopped outright.

Israel requires foreign carriers to submit lists of inbound passengers and crew in advance. FlyDubai sent the manifest for Flight 1073, said Israel’s Tax Authority, which maintains the country’s database of flier information. But the Ministry of Transportation, which oversees foreign carriers, said it didn’t believe it had the authority or required expertise to vet flight crews.

The ministry has never asked for a passenger or crew list since the database was set up in 2023. It says it didn’t know it could. Instead, the ministry says FlyDubai agreed in writing to check its pilots’ backgrounds and nationalities.

A classified 2024 report flagged the ministry for failing to adequately secure foreign carriers’ flights.

With the string of missed opportunities, the dramatic fight for survival by the wounded captain and a handful of passengers is now being overshadowed by a growing realization there was a massive security failure on several fronts.

Security experts said the failure is remarkable given the surveillance and intelligence capabilities of the U.A.E. and Israel, and the obvious threats to the route the co-pilot was allowed to fly.

It also points to a conundrum of aviation security. Regulators buffeted by major failures like the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the U.S. and the intentional crash by the co-pilot of Germanwings Flight 9525 in 2015 are caught in a tug of war—protecting against dangerous passengers by securing the cockpit or guarding against rogue pilots by making it easier to intervene.

Security experts say the onus has to be on intelligence services to identify and stop threats before they ever get to the airport.

“If this was a dedicated jihadist terror attack, there are multiple levels of failure that happened from an intelligence perspective way before we get to the fact that someone may have missed something in security screening,” said Matthew Borie, chief intelligence officer and co-founder of Osprey Flight Solutions.

Officials in the U.A.E., Oman and Israel all privately said there were significant failures across the board—from the U.A.E. and Israel’s vetting to Oman’s communication of its concerns about Hammami.

The U.A.E. declined to comment while the investigation into the incident and its causes is ongoing. A spokeswoman for the Omani government didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday said he ordered a review of the security of foreign airline flights to the country.

The security missteps culminated in a dramatic series of events a little over halfway into Flight 1073’s trip to Tel Aviv last week. The airplane’s captain, Smit Machchhar, said his co-pilot excused himself to pray then struck him several times with an onboard emergency ax. The pilot managed to open the cockpit door, letting in a group of rescuers who subdued the co-pilot and pulled the plane out of a dangerous dive.

The U.A.E.’s attorney general said Saturday that the co-pilot had tried to commit an act of terrorism. Saudi Arabia, the U.A.E. and Israel all suspect he was trying to crash the plane in Tel Aviv, people familiar with their thinking said.

All three are investigating whether he acted alone. They haven’t turned up any links to any foreign power or major terrorist organization, they said.

Hammami is 29 years old, born to an Omani father and Syrian mother, The Wall Street Journal previously reported.

He lives in Dubai but traveled frequently as a teenager to Syria during that country’s long civil war. Investigators are looking into the possibility he began to radicalize in the war-torn country where Islamist rebels fought against the ruling Assad regime.

Hammami studied in Australia, a period Israel and the U.A.E. are scrutinizing for signs of budding radicalism, some of the people familiar with the matter said. The Victorian Joint Counter Terrorism Team said it is investigating the co-pilot’s links to the country.

He joined Oman Air in 2018 and became a pilot in early 2022. In 2024, authorities found he was browsing extremist websites and blogs and grew concerned about his radical views. It disallowed him from flying, made him take a deradicalization program and gave him an administrative job.

He left Oman Air in early 2025, people familiar with his career said. He traveled to Morocco that summer and tried to get a job with flag carrier Royal Air Maroc. He underwent three months of training with the company, but ultimately wasn’t hired, Moroccan state media said, citing the company.

This February, he joined FlyDubai, a budget carrier owned by the city’s flagship Emirates Airline aggressively hiring pilots to feed its growth.

The airline launched in 2009 and has been expanding quickly. Its more than 1,300 pilots fly to 140 airports in cities like Sarajevo, Damascus and Tashkent, often moving workers from South and Southeast Asia to more lucrative markets in Central Europe and the Middle East. Last year, it posted passenger growth of 17% in the Middle East.

Global demand for pilots is running high. There were 382,000 commercial pilots around the world in 2025, according to aviation training technology company CAE. The industry will need to hire another 267,000 by the middle of the next decade, it said.

To help meet its needs, FlyDubai set up a program last year to train pilots from scratch and operates its own flight training center.

People familiar with the events said Oman also mishandled the situation. International aviation licensing is largely on a country by country basis. But if Oman had formally pulled Hammami’s license over its concerns, it likely would have been flagged to the U.A.E., people familiar with the matter said.

Concerns about extremism should have been flagged around the Gulf as well, the people said.

Israel should have been aware of Hammami’s presence in the cockpit.

Foreign airlines submit lists of passengers and crew to Israel ahead of time. A 2023 law set up the database of those lists managed by Israel’s Tax Authority with the primary goal of preventing terrorism.

Under Israel’s division of labor, the Shin Bet internal security service oversees the country’s airlines. It falls to the Transportation Ministry to oversee the pilots and crew on foreign carriers’ flights to make sure they come from friendly countries, said Eytan Ben David, former director of the counterterrorism bureau in the Israeli prime minister’s office and former deputy head of the aviation security division in El Al, Israel’s flagship airline.

Ben David said that around a decade ago he was alerted by the Transportation Ministry that Turkish Airlines intended to place an Iranian pilot on a flight to Tel Aviv based on a staff list the airline had sent.

“We stopped it immediately,” Ben David said.

The database makes that work easier. The legislation says authorized bodies like the Ministry of Transportation and other security agencies including the Shin Bet and Mossad can ask to review lists to vet people on flights.

The ministry said it was never told the database was operational or could be accessed. A person familiar with the database said the ministry has never asked.

On the question of stopping onboard threats, the ministry said it is responsible for the security of incoming flights but isn’t itself responsible for vetting flight crews and lacks the intelligence capabilities to do so. It relies on foreign carriers to make those checks in line with its requirements.

“The Security Division at the Ministry of Transport has been responsible for security arrangements for incoming foreign aviation to Israel since 1977,” it said. “Framework-wise, the Ministry verifies with the countries from which flights depart that the airlines’ pilots undergo background security checks in accordance with international regulation.”

The ministry said it required FlyDubai to assign pilots from countries with diplomatic relations with Israel and conduct background checks, and didn’t itself check or approve Hammami.

A classified May 2024 report by Israel’s comptroller general warned Israel’s aviation security had grown lax and identified major issues in the way foreign airlines entering Israeli airspace were secured. Responsibility for security in Israel was fragmented, and the lines of responsibility weren’t always clear, it found.

It found that officials in the Ministry of Transportation were failing in their oversight in part due to manpower and budget issues, a person familiar with the report said.

Israeli airlines got closer scrutiny, the person said.

The divergent treatment was evident this year. In February, security officials stopped Israel’s own airlines from flying between Dubai and Tel Aviv for several months amid the risks posed by the war against Iran and long-held concerns about gaps in the Dubai airport’s security for flights to the country.

FlyDubai, however, continued to work the route. It has become a crucial connection between Israel and the rest of the world, maintaining service almost continuously throughout the past three years of war that began in Gaza and spread to Lebanon and Iran.

Israel should have caught the Omani pilot based solely on his nationality, Ben David said. Pilots who should have been excluded by their nationalities have been flying to Israel more frequently, a sign enforcement had grown sloppy, people familiar with the matter said.

Ben David said Flight 1073 almost ended in disaster due to negligence.

“It seems that the names weren’t properly checked and there wasn’t proper vetting. This is how we got here,” he said. “We need to treat this incident as if a disaster happened.”

The withdrawal came with unusual speed, following what U.S. officials said were threats of an Iran-based plot against the installation.

The United States rushed over the weekend to withdraw all 12 B-1 Air Force bombers from an air base in southern England after commanders received new threats about an Iran-backed plot against the installation, two U.S. officials said on Sunday.

The withdrawal was highly unusual: Such moves are rarely made so quickly from an allied air base in a peacetime country thousands of miles from a combat zone.

The need to move the bombers out of the base, R.A.F. Fairford, was deemed so urgent that some of the planes and their flight crews left while aerial refueling aircraft were still being scrambled to support their flights to the United States. At least three of the planes had landed at their home base in South Dakota by Sunday, the officials said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss operational matters.

The Pentagon’s European Command confirmed on Sunday that the bombers had left England but declined to comment on any new warnings.

“We can acknowledge now that all U.S. bombers that were deployed to R.A.F. Fairford are redeploying to their home stations in the United States,” the command said in a statement. “U.S. Air Force bombers routinely operate around the world to support global force readiness and operational requirements.”

The British Ministry of Defense declined to comment on the movements of U.S. military assets.

American officials on Sunday declined to specify the nature of the new information that prompted the rapid withdrawal of the Air Force bombers, some of which had just arrived in the past week as part of a normal rotation of forces. One U.S. official said the new information was part of the same threat warnings that surfaced three weeks ago, but specific details and a sense of urgency spiked in the past 24 hours, alarming commanders.

The sudden pullout of the bombers came a week after the British police arrested five men who had been traveling last Sunday morning in white vans near the base, which has been used by American bombers in the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran. The men were released on bail a day later after the authorities did not discover explosives in the vans.

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But the police have repeatedly said the men remain under investigation, and a dual British-Iranian national was arrested on Thursday on suspicion of preparing terrorist acts.

Prime Minister Andy Burnham said last week that the British government believed Iran played a part in planning those events. U.S. and British officials, as well as those in Germany and Israel, believe the operation is connected to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps or a separate military headquarters in Tehran. Iran has denied the accusations.

The episode has presented the authorities with myriad puzzles as they try to sort out the events over the past week, including the arrests, the frantic evacuation of 85 homes, a bomb disposal robot searching the vans for explosives and a national security meeting convened by Mr. Burnham.

In July, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards issued a statement warning that allowing the United States to use the base “makes London responsible” for U.S. actions. “Any base used to launch attacks on Iranian territory,” the statement said, “is a legitimate target for our forces.”

In September, U.S. military commanders received a chilling warning from American and other Western intelligence agencies, according to U.S. officials briefed on the information. R.A.F. Fairford was the target of a potential Iran-backed attack.

The murky outlines of a plot had been pieced together through a combination of intercepted communications, informants and other intelligence. Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said his intelligence officials also warned their British counterparts of a probable Iranian-sponsored attack, though they did not provide a specific target. Follow-up attacks were likely to include drones, the confidential assessments warned.

After that initial warning last month, concern among officials across Europe surged. According to a senior U.S. official, Israel warned Germany that American bases there were at heightened risk, noting Spangdahlem and Ramstein in particular.

An Iran-backed plot to commit an attack in Britain would be a major escalation by Tehran against a Western country in apparent retaliation for the American-and Israeli-led war against Iran.

Spending on AI Is Becoming Almost Impossible for Businesses to Budget

Artificial-intelligence use is measured in tokens, but the models’ use of tokens at any given task can be unpredictable

First, there was #tokenmaxxing, whereby American businesses encouraged their workers to use as much AI as possible. Then came the bill.

Companies started to realize they need to be more careful about counting their tokens, the units that measure AI use. And that’s hard to do: A recent study found that only 11% of nearly 400 businesses surveyed were able to accurately forecast AI spending.

Unlike traditional software, AI behaves more like a human worker: It takes action, makes decisions, sometimes even makes mistakes—all on the clock.

While more-advanced models tend to cost more per token, they can sometimes perform tasks more efficiently, leading to lower overall costs. Likewise, asking a “cheap” model to do something it isn’t suited to handle could cause a token run-up.

Researchers from Stanford University, Carnegie Mellon University, and the University of California, Berkeley, as well as Microsoft Research put this to the test earlier this year, running models through more than 6,800 tasks spanning math, programming, science and other areas. In 32% of cases, lower-priced models actually cost more than higher-priced models.

“The practical takeaway is clear,” said Lingjiao Chen, one of the researchers. “Price alone should not be used to infer which model is actually cheaper.”

When cheap gets expensive

Here’s an example of the same prompt presented to two Google models, the Gemini 3.1 Pro—generally used for tasks that require reasoning and judgment—and the less expensive, lighter, speedier Gemini 3 Flash.

The pricier Pro model finished in 85 steps, whereas the less expensive Flash model went through nearly 1,000 steps…then failed.

The less expensive model failed after running up $14 worth of token use, while the pricier one succeeded for just $1. While this result could have been an anomaly, it is something that can happen in regular model use.

Same model, different results

Even the same model might use a different number of tokens each time it completes a task.

Suppose you pay a lawn service $20 an hour to mow. The first week, it takes two hours and costs $40. A week later, the job takes eight hours and costs $160. On week three, the job takes five hours, but only half your lawn is trimmed.

Here’s an example of that, from the researchers’ data. We selected these two prompts to demonstrate the variability of results.

Google, Anthropic and OpenAI—whose models researchers used for this testing—have since released new models that perform better in industry benchmarks.

“Some prompt-level fluctuation is inherent to AI, and our testing shows this averages out across a high volume of real-world, diverse workloads,” said a Google spokeswoman in a statement. “Total costs depend on many factors for a given task,” she added, “which can make it hard to forecast new and evolving technology with precision.” She said the company offers customers more control via spending caps and flexible pricing.

As more companies add AI to their daily workflows, they will also need strategies to manage their use, such as training employees on which model to use for a particular task. Otherwise, they could end up with IT bills that come out of a black box.

News Corp, owner of The Wall Street Journal, has a content-licensing partnership with OpenAI.