Cairo: The Suez Canal will not announce its tolls for 2009 until next week because of the uncertainty in the shipping industry caused by piracy and the global financial crisis, a canal authority official said today.

The new tolls will be announced at a press conference on Monday, the state MENA news agency said.

Any changes are normally announced in December but a canal official told AFP that this year's announcement had been delayed because of "big fluctuations in the shipping market and world commerce."

But he predicted that they would be kept the same or even cut because of the impact on traffic of the economic slowdown and the threat of piracy in the Gulf of Aden.

Arms manufacturers in particular have rerouted their shipping round the Cape of Good Hope in recent months to avoid the pirates preying on vessels en route between the Suez Canal and the Indian Ocean.

Officials predicted that traffic volume would be seven per cent down in December compared with the same period of last year.

The canal is Egypt's third-largest source of revenue after tourism and remittances from expatriate workers.
Source : PTI