Egypt’s finance minister denied a report published on Monday that the government had raised its budget deficit forecast for this fiscal year to 150 billion Egyptian pounds. Recent reform measures taken by the government to get the deficit under control had succeeded, in a statement on his ministry’s website. The size of the deficit was not expected to exceed 144 billion Egyptian pounds ($24 billion), and not 150 million as mentioned by some media, he said. The state MENA news agency quoted Deputy Finance Minister Abdul-Aziz Mohamed Tantawy.