The Delenda Affair, named after a disgruntled shareholder, is what Heineken, the Dutch brewing giant, labeled its twelve-year dispute with the Egyptian government. Lasting from 1963 until 1975, the battle would become an international issue involving ambassadors, foreign ministries, and even the International Monetary Fund. The point of contention was what the Egyptian government owed foreign investors after its expansive nationalization of the country’s private sector in the 1950s and 1960s. Although the two sides would eventually come to an agreement, the intense back and forth, preserved in Heineken’s company archives, sheds light on Egypt’s economy in a transitional period. This paper, using unstudied archival material from Heineken, the Egyptian government, and local breweries, argues that the Delenda Affair lays bare the roots of Egypt’s economic problems since the 1970s. The dispute was a natural outgrowth of a corporation dealing with a government caught between two minds. During the period from 1963 to 1975, the Egyptian government could not decide whether they wanted to be a market or command economy. The failure to plot a single course complicated their relations with foreign investors and created an economic situation that featured the problems of both types of economies. Specifically, the indecision forced Anwar Sadat’s government to provide excessively favorable conditions for foreign investment in order to combat the misgivings foreign companies, like Heineken, had about returning to a country that less than a decade prior had nationalized the majority of the private sector. It also meant that when Sadat tried to transition back to a market economy with his Infitah he did not initiate many of the necessary, and politically unpopular, measures to aid that transition. This indecision reshaped the Delenda Affair, which began as Heineken’s fight to recoup some of its losses after nationalization, into a decade-long referendum on the economic future of Egypt. For Egypt as a whole, the net result was a bloated public sector existing in parallel, and oftentimes in tandem, with an oligopolistic private sector, a reality which would hinder Egypt for decades going forward. The long lasting effects are obvious in the case of the Delenda Affair. The Egyptian government and Heineken would come to an agreement over recompense, aided in large part by the government’s desire to encourage Heineken to reinvest, but the whole experience would scare Heineken away from Egypt until 2003, after Egypt was forced to commit to a market economy.