Vietnam has asked Japan for support to build a high-speed railway that runs along the country’s length, Hanoi said on Friday.
The proposal was made at a meeting between Vietnamese Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh and Japanese Minister of Finance Shunichi Suzuki in Hanoi earlier in the day, the Vietnamese government said in a statement.
Japan is the largest source of official development aid to Vietnam and is the Southeast Asian country’s third-largest source of foreign direct investment.
Vietnam is studying the possibility to build the 1,545km railway with a possible price tag of up to US$64.8 billion, state media reported.
At the meeting, Chinh also asked Japan for help to “restructure stakes” at Nghi Son Refinery and Petrochemical, Vietnam’s largest oil refinery, the government said, without elaborating.
The US$9 billion refinery is 35.1 percent owned by Japan’s Idemitsu Kosan Co, 35.1 percent by Kuwait Petroleum, 25.1 percent by Vietnam’s state oil firm PetroVietnam and 4.7 percent by Mitsui Chemicals Inc.
The 200,000-barrel-per-day refinery early last year cut its run rate following a disagreement between shareholders about financing for crude.
Idemitsu Kosan said at the time that it had no plan to give fresh financial aid to the refinery.
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