Egypt’s richest man plots $50 billion takeover of America’s infrastructure boom

Egypt’s richest man, Nassef Sawiris, has set his sights on the U.S market, with the intent to invest up to $50 billion in the North American country’s infrastructure projects.

• Nassef Sawiris, Egypt’s wealthiest individual, plans to invest $50 billion in U.S. infrastructure projects.
• He is consolidating his companies in Abu Dhabi for this expansion and merging OCI Global with Orascom Construction.
• The plan includes making the merged entity public in Abu Dhabi and focusing on infrastructure investments.
• Sawiris relocated to Abu Dhabi and Italy to align with tax and business benefits abroad.

The Egyptian billionaire unveiled his plans in an interview with the Financial Times, where he noted that he is consolidating his publicly traded holding companies in Abu Dhabi to make an aggressive push into the U.S market.

The Egyptian billionaire and owner of Aston Villa, a football club in England, is closing in on the completion of the dissolution of his Dutch-listed fertilizer and chemicals company, OCI Global, which has sold off assets valued at over $11.6 billion over the last couple of years.

Subsequent to the completion of the asset sales, Sawiris has set his sights on integrating OCI into Orascom Construction, his family’s historic company, in a deal that will be revealed on Monday.

The newly merged entity is scheduled to go public in Abu Dhabi. Sawiris recently relocated to the emirate and Italy after departing from the UK, a country from which several businesses have left due to tax policy changes.

The company’s main focus will be on infrastructure investment in the United States. It aims to leverage Orascom’s building expertise and the more than $1 billion in cash and other proceeds on OCI’s balance sheet to capitalize on a boom in expenditure in sectors like data centers.

The company plans to invest its own capital and partners’ funds in US infrastructure via equity and credit investments in the coming decade.

“We want to focus the next stage of our business on the area we see the biggest opportunity, which is infrastructure,” Sawiris told the Financial Times.

“Any day, these companies will be more successful than a bunch of bankers who do desktop analysis of an asset and then struggle to create the most value,” Sawiris added.

BlackRock’s GIP and Brookfield Asset Management are among some of the major firms that have, in recent years, taken advantage of the infrastructure sector in the U.S market.

As per the KPMG audit, OCI and Orascom returned more than $22 billion in dividends to investors while achieving an overall internal rate of return of more than 39% from Orascom’s 1999 listing and the end of 2024.

OCI, which is listed on the Amsterdam Stock Exchange, sold its international methanol business to US specialist Methanex last year for approximately $2 billion.

This was the group’s fourth deal since conducting a strategic review in 2023.