The Cairo Electric Railways & Heliopolis Oases Company (Arabic: شركة سكك حديد مصر الكهربائية و واحات عين شمس) was formed in Cairo, Egypt in 1906 to develop a 25 square kilometer plot of land into the Heliopolis suburb.

[1] On May 20, 1905, the Egyptian government signed a concession to develop a large desert plot of 25 square kilometres north-east of Cairo, with Belgian industrialist Édouard Empain and Boghos Nubar Pasha, son of the former Egyptian Prime Minister Nubar Pasha.

The new suburb was planned with rail and tramway links to the centre of Cairo, and consisted of plots for villas, Heliopolis style apartment blocks, workers' housing, the Heliopolis Palace Hotel (converted later into a presidential palace), restaurants, shops, churches, mosques, a synagogue, and hospitals.

[6] The post-independence socialist government of Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalised the company in 1961, turning it into the public Masr al-Gadida Suburb Organisation (Arabic:مؤسسة ضاحية مصر الجديدة) and affiliated to the Ministry of Municipal and Village Affairs, taking on the real estate development business.

All had been constructed and put together by the contracting firms Leon Rolin & Co. and Padova, Dentamaro & Ferro, the biggest two civil contractors in Egypt.

As tourism became a mega-industry, massive hotels emerged in Egypt with interiors calculated on the basis of return per square meter.

[9] In the 1980s, which marks the beginning of the Mubarak regime, the Heliopolis Palace Hotel was declared the headquarters of the new presidential administration, after becoming the location of various government departments for over 10 years.