End of the Smouhaha

The British and the Egyptians finally settled their accounts on the 1956 Suez war. For six weeks they had haggled over 700 acres of land near Alexandria owned by Joseph Smouha, 83-year-old Iraqi-born Jew known as the wealthiest British subject in Egypt (TIME. March 2). Solution of the Smouhaha. as the British called it: the Egyptians would give him back the race track, golf course and other built-up property that they had seized from him after the British landings. But they would keep the surrounding farm land which, for tax purposes, he had valued unusually low. It would be up to the British to compensate him.

"A reasonable and practical settlement," Chancellor of the Exchequer Derick Heathcoat Amory called it, but nobody else in Britain was much cheered by the terms. Heathcoat Amory had to admit that the value of business property for which the Egyptians are to pay $87 million was estimated by Britain at $126 million, and the Egyptians themselves put the value at $107 million.