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By Alaa Shahine
ISMAILIA, Egypt, Jan 5 (Reuters) - The Suez Canal Authority said on Monday it would leave unchanged its transit tolls for 2009 despite its expectations that the global financial crisis will reduce traffic.
Authority Chairman Ahmed Fadel also said the waterway earned a record $5.4 billion in 2008, up 16.7 percent from 2007.
Asked if the authority would consider reviewing tolls if the financial crisis deepened, Fadel said: "All options are open."
The canal is an important source of foreign exchange for Egypt, along with tourism, hydrocarbon exports and the remittances of Egyptians who work abroad.
Traffic and cargo have fallen in the last three months of 2008 as a result of the financial crisis, Fadel said. The economic slowdown has also pushed shipping rates down to around $18,000 a day from $163,000 before the crisis, he added.
"The negative effect (of the financial crisis) started to show in December in particular," he said.
"If the (crisis) continues at its current rate, the number of ships and cargo going through the canal is expected to drop by 7 percent in 2009."
The revenue in December was 6.7 percent down compared with the previous month, Fadel said, which suggests it was 8.1 percent down compared with December 2007.
The number of ships passing through the canal in all of 2008 was 21,420, suggesting the number in December fell 13.8 percent to 1,565 from 1,815 in December 2007, based on the monthly figures provided by the authority.
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Reham El-Desoki, a senior economic analyst at Beltone Financial, a Cairo-based investment bank, said the decision to keep the transit fees unchanged was expected.
"We understand that the authority already grants certain vessels attractive prices based on the type of vessel and load and we expect it could continue to use this method to provide incentives for certain vessels to use the waterway," she said.
She said she expected the canal to bring in between $4.9 billion to $5 billion in the current 2008/09 fiscal year from $5.2 billion a year earlier "under the assumption of stable transit fees and lower traffic and tonnage".
Lower revenues from the canal, tourism and investment are expected to drag real economic growth in the most populous Arab country to a median of 5.25 percent, from 7.2 percent in the 2007/08 fiscal year, according to a recent Reuters poll.
Apart from the effects of recession in wealthy countries, which will bring down the volume of trade between Europe and Asia, the canal faces the challenge of keeping it attractive for ships which have to run the gauntlet of Somali pirates.
Several shipping companies have told their vessels to sail around the Cape of Good Hope instead of risking the trip through the Gulf of Aden, where the pirates have been active.
Fadel said the threat of piracy on the canal was minimal compared with that of the financial crisis. (Writing by Jonathan Wright and Alaa Shahine)