Parliament's finance committee clears 230 million dollars of foreign financing to prop up the phosphate industry
The finance and budget committee of the Assembly of the Representatives of the People approved three bills at its July 21 sitting: a state guarantee on a 110-million-euro EBRD loan for the Gafsa Phosphate Company's CAPSA project (new mining equipment and high-pressure filtration of process water, which management says should raise extraction capacity by about 30 percent and water recovery from roughly 60 to over 90 percent), and two murabaha agreements worth 120 million dollars with the International Islamic Trade Finance Corporation, ring-fenced for imports of sulphur and ammonia for the Tunisian Chemical Group. MPs pressed both chief executives on falling output, accumulated losses and ageing plant; the CPG chief said a recovery plan would take five to seven years. The state is borrowing abroad to keep a strategic exporter running rather than to expand it.