CAIRO — Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi's visit to Saudi Arabia this week, where he met with the kingdom’s crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, ended without any major announcements. But it came at a time when Egypt is battling a deep economic crisis while its Gulf allies have grown increasingly reluctant to offer support without conditions.

In the document accompanying the $3 billion agreement that Egypt and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) signed in December 2022, Cairo stated that it had identified a group of state-owned enterprises from whose stake sale it hoped to raise $2.5 billion by June. The funds would be allocated to the country’s $5 billion financing gap.

Months earlier, when the economic turmoil unleashed by the Russian invasion of Ukraine accelerated a massive capital flight in Egypt and left the country in a very vulnerable economic position, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Saudi Arabia had all stepped in, pledging to inject at least $22 billion to shore up Cairo’s finances, mainly through investments.

Yet one year after those initial pledges, and almost four months after the IMF deal, only a fraction of these investments have materialized, owing to difficulties to agree on how to proceed, Cairo’s reluctance to sell strategic and lucrative assets and companies, Egypt’s highly volatile economy and the refusal of its Gulf allies to keep disbursing easy money.