 The origins of the Egyptian debt before the revolution was basically what the regimes inherited from the Mubarak regime. Mubarak received a very generous debt relief package in the early 90s but still managed to leave in 2011 with a legacy of more than 30 billion US dollars of debt. During this time this debt wasn't just accumulated and spent inefficiently on subsidies to energy-intensive industries but also on other projects that never came close to providing social welfare to Egyptian people. But it was also accompanied with a program sponsored by the IMF of privatization and liberalization which today we've seen a huge number of these projects in court being tested on corruption grounds. So effectively this debt was very much related to the economic and social inequalities that triggered the revolution. Today this debt has been extended as are the policies, the Mubarak policies. We've accumulated almost 20 more billion debt over the last three years during the military transition rule and the Brotherhood rule but also during the very short new military transition rule again. The role of the current creditors in Egypt was pretty evident ever since the revolution took place as what was known as the Duval Partnership was launched shortly after the revolution by the G8 and at the center of this partnership was basically the IMF being basically the umbrella and any debt that was going to be raised by the EU or by any multilateral organization was always contingent to agree and deal with the IMF. So that shows you that a lot of any funding coming into Egypt was actually going to be contingent on agreeing to deal with IMF and as a result most of the economic programs that were being drafted were actually IMF, very IMF sponsored programs that focused on austerity measures, focused on regressive taxation and avoided more progressive measures like proper progressive income, progressive taxation, wealth taxes and reviewing the current investment policies and making structural reforms to the economy. At this point we see the role as limiting the policy space of the Egyptian policymakers. It's an obstacle for us to sort of be able to radically restructure the economy and achieve this economic and social justice objectives because you're tied with debt obligations that occupy more than 40% of Egypt's total budget expenditures but also because in agreement with these international organizations whether trade or debt obligations you're restricted in how much you can do domestically to change your economic policies, how much you can decide whether to liberalize or not liberalize your sectors, how much protection you can offer and how much investments you can actually allocate to social and productive sectors. So in a lot of ways the role is huge if not the most influential role in terms of restricting our ability to achieve the goals of the revolution. The popular campaign to drop Egypt's debt was conceived after the January 25th revolution and it set out to sort of free Egyptian people from the exploitive economic policies that existed during the Mubarak era. The causes of the campaign or the objectives of the campaign were to basically call for a debt audit to review all Egypt's debt and call for eventually eradicating the obvious debt that was accumulated during the last 30 years but also to sort of regain a lot of the policies faced that has been diminished or constrained by pressure from international financial organizations and by neoliberal policies adopted by the Mubarak regime. We were looking at also introducing alternative economic measures that were more progressive like I mentioned earlier and that focused more on redistribution of the wealth and less on putting the onus on the poor to shoulder the deficiencies in the economy whether through regressive taxation methods like the VAT or the consumption taxes or also whether and not having a proper income tax, progressive income tax that taxes the wealthy and relieves the least privileged.