Egypt's sovereign fund to complete historic hotels sale by year-end

Egypt will close the sale of a group of seven hotels, several of them historic, by the end of the year, the head of the Sovereign Fund of Egypt Ayman Soliman said on Thursday.

"It has been awarded. So we're now in partnership moving towards a close before the end of the year, closing with the winning investors," Soliman said in an interview at the Reuters NEXT conference in New York.

"They're going to turn around those trophy assets in Egypt, and with a view of taking those public as well."

The hotels, among Egypt's grandest, are the Cataract in Aswan, the Winter in Luxor, the Mena House in Cairo and the Cecil in Alexandria, all built in the late 19th or early 20th centuries.

Soliman did not give the name of the buyer. In June, Qatar was reported to be in talks over their purchase, but the following month Egypt's planning minister announced Egypt had awarded a $700 million stake in the hotels company to a consortium that included the local Talaat Mostafa Group Holding Co.