Bloomberg Egypt will ask the International Monetary Fund’s executive board within a day or two to consider its $12 billion loan request, Finance Minister Amr El-Garhy said, after the central bank freed the pound’s exchange rate to help spur investments and ease a dollar crunch. The push to finalize the loan comes as Egyptian banks began freely trading foreign …

  AFP Iran will sign a deal with France’s Total on Tuesday for the development of gas production at a major offshore field in the Gulf, the Iranian oil ministry said. The Heads of Agreement (HOA) for the development of Phase 11 of the important South Pars field is worth $6 billion (5.4 billion euros), a ministry spokesman said The …

  Bloomberg Saudi Arabian Oil Co. halted shipments of oil products to Egypt indefinitely, Egyptian Oil Minister Tarek El-Molla said, forcing the Arab world’s most populous nation to buy fuels on world markets at higher cost. The state producer known as Saudi Aramco informed the Egyptian General Petroleum Corp. in early October that it would halt supplies of refined oil …