Germany is revisiting a contentious decision to allow Chinese state-owned conglomerate Cosco Shipping Holdings Ltd (中遠海運控股) to buy a 24.9 percent stake in one of Hamburg’s port terminals after a government agency reclassified the port terminal as critical infrastructure.
The move comes as German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and German Minister for Foreign Affairs Annalena Baerbock work on a new China strategy in which Berlin is expected to adopt a more critical stance on China following Beijing’s increasingly militaristic threats against Taiwan.
The investigation into Cosco’s planned investment in Hamburg port terminal Tollerort is ongoing and Berlin’s final approval of the transaction is pending, German Ministry of Economics and Technology spokeswoman Beate Baron said at a regular government news conference in Berlin.
Photo:AFP
Earlier on Wednesday, a spokesperson for port operator Hamburger Hafen und Logistik AG (HHLA) confirmed media reports that the German Federal Office for Information Security changed the status of the port terminal to critical infrastructure at the beginning of this year following new legislation passed by Scholz’s ruling coalition in December last year.
“Since the circumstances have changed, we as the economy ministry are examining the consequences,” Baron said.
Asked if this means that the government could still block the Cosco plan, Baron said she could not speculate about the outcome of the review, and gave no hint if or when Berlin might approve the investment.
Germany should “provide a fair, just and nondiscriminatory environment” for its firms, Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Wang Wenbin (汪文斌) said yesterday at a regular news conference in Beijing.
“We hope the German side will refrain from politicizing commercial cooperation and making it something about ideology or security, and setting barriers to such cooperation,” he said.
The German government had initially agreed on a compromise that would have allowed the Chinese state-owned shipping conglomerate to buy a 24.9 percent stake in one of Hamburg’s port terminals.
The stake would have been slightly less than what is considered a blocking minority in Germany.
The decision would have prevented a strategic investment in one of HHLA’s terminals and reduces the acquisition to a purely financial investment, the economic ministry said at the time.
The deal reached in October last year was seen as a face-saving solution for Scholz, who had initially supported the sale of a 35 percent stake to Cosco.
However, German Minister for Economic Affairs Robert Habeck and German Minister of Finance Christian Lindner, among several other ministers, had voiced their opposition to a bigger stake.
Under the planned investment, Cosco would not gain any access or decisionmaking rights in operational management, customer relationships or IT systems, an HHLA spokesperson said.
Separately, Baerbock is traveling to Beijing for political talks this week in which she is to address Taiwan Strait security, Chinese human rights and Beijing’s role in the global fight against climate change, German Ministry of Foreign Afairs spokeswoman Andrea Sasse said.
“We are very concerned about the situation in the [Taiwan Strait]. We expect from all actors in the region to contribute to stability and peace, and this also applies to China,” Sasse said.
“We have the impression that measures such as military threats run counter to this goal and rather increase the risk of unintended military clashes,” she added.
Scholz told China ahead of a trip to Tokyo last month that Beijing should not change Taiwan’s status by force.
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