Why Doesn't Egypt — or an Egyptian Billionaire — Buy Pharos's Assets?

On Friday, Israel's Ratio Petroleum Energy announced that it had raised its offer to acquire Pharos Energy — which owns assets in Egypt and Vietnam — to around £146.4 million ($196.97 million), outbidding rival oil producer Serica Energy and thereby regaining the board's recommendation in favour of its offer.

So, what are Pharos Energy's assets in Egypt?

British company Pharos Energy holds a 45% stake in two oil and gas concessions in Egypt's Western Desert. The company originally held a much larger share — full 100% ownership. Still, in 2022 it farmed out 55% of its stake, along with operatorship, to a company called IPR Lake Qarun Petroleum, a subsidiary of multi-national Swiss-registered IPR Energy AG.

The first concession is El Fayum. Pharos Energy — then still operating as SOCO International — entered Egypt in 2019, when it completed its acquisition of Merlon Petroleum El Fayum for approximately $215 million, paid through roughly $136 million in cash and the issuance of new SOCO shares.

El Fayum is an active production asset located roughly 80 km southwest of Cairo, containing around 11 producing oil fields spread across a development area of approximately 256 square kilometres.

The second is North Beni Suef. Originally an exploration licence, it's now in active production following a commercial discovery.

The location of the two concessions according to Pharos Energy

The two companies recently merged operations across both concessions into a single consolidated agreement with the Egyptian General Petroleum Corporation (EGPC), adding three new exploration areas to expand investment.

On the ground, Pharos's net share of production currently stands at around 1,303 barrels of oil per day, with a target of reaching 1,450 bpd. More significantly, the company recently received a $12.6 million payment toward its overdue receivables from the Egyptian government, bringing its outstanding debt in Egypt down to zero and clearing the way for it to begin drilling new wells.

It's also worth noting that in October 2019, Israel's Energy Ministry granted Pharos — along with Cairn Energy and Ratio Oil — eight offshore exploration licences for Israeli blocks. In other words, Ratio and Pharos were already licence-partners in Israeli waters years before Ratio moved to acquire Pharos outright.

I've had enough of foreign control — let alone Israeli control — over our gas and oil sources, especially when millions, if not billions, of dollars have gone into projects that seemed far less urgent than our own energy national security.

Enough already of depending so deeply and structurally on Israeli energy.

In 2025, Egypt signed a record $35 billion gas deal with Israel's Leviathan field operators, tripling its gas imports from Israel and marking the largest export deal in Israeli history — some 130 billion cubic meters of gas to be piped from Leviathan to Egypt through 2040.

Israeli gas already accounts for roughly 15 to 20% of Egypt's total consumption, arriving via a pipeline that was once built to send Egyptian gas to Israel and now runs in reverse — carrying Israeli gas into Egypt's Damietta LNG terminal, some of which is then re-exported to Europe.

The irony is hard to overstate: gas infrastructure originally built to carry Egyptian exports has been repurposed to feed Egyptian demand with Israeli supply. 

In another universe, we would be asking the Egyptian government how this came to pass.

Israeli firms with direct financial stakes in this pipeline — NewMed Energy and Ratio Energies among them — are the same names now showing up in Egypt's upstream oil sector too, from Ratio Petroleum's bid for Pharos Energy's El Fayum and North Beni Suef concessions to the broader web of joint ventures across the Eastern Mediterranean gas trade.

Why not spend $200 million and buy that Egyptian unit of Pharos Energy outright? Why shouldn't the Egyptian government buy Pharos Energy's Egypt unit itself, to curb this foreign control?

Already, the deal cannot close without Cairo's regulatory sign-off. The Egyptian government must approve the sale for it to proceed, and it could also exercise pre-emption rights, allowing the state to acquire the assets ahead of Ratio.

Why not the Egyptian tycoons — billionaires like the Sawiris family, the Mansour family, the El-Sewedy family, or Hisham Talaat Mostafa — step in and acquire Pharos's Egypt unit? It would be so easy for them.

I know I'm asking for something that seems impossible now, because this isn't the era of patriotic, visionary industrialists like the late Talaat Harb, unfortunately. But maybe — just maybe — miracles happen.