Chinese company wants to build Femern-connection

China Communications Construction Company (CCCC), which also call themself “The Company” has contacted Femern A/S, Danish state-own company in charge of the project planning in relation to the establishment of a fixed link across the Fehmarn Belt between Denmark and Germany, and offered to build and finance the connection, which is supposed to be one of Europe’s largest construction projects ever with an expected price of DDK 40 billion.

Chinese model not possible
Chinese state owned construction companies use a classical Chinese approach when building large projects abroad. They offer an all included packet consisting of both building the project with Chinese labour and financing it with loans from state owned Chinese bank on favorable terms.

This model won’t be possible in the Femern project, where the building part and finance part are strictly separated. Using cheap Chinese labour won’t be possible either, although there have been doubts whether Danish collectively agreed wages will be a demnad to the contractor due to EU legislation. Tecnical director Steen Lykke promised in August Danish unions that the tunnel won’t be build by heavily underpaid labour.

“I would like to guarantee that we will not see Filipino workers paid 20 DDK per hour on the Femern connection,” he said then to avisen.dk

Chinese financing welcome
Former Export Ambassador to China Ritt Bjerregaard welcomes the Chinese interest both as contractor and as financing partner.

“I think we should be happy, that countries with money to invest are interested  in Denmark,” she says.

Allan Christensen, Chief Financial Officer at Femern A/S, welcome Chinese financing to.

“When we get to financing the project, Chinese banks are welcome on equal basis as everybody else in the market,” he says.

Debarred by the World Bank for fraud
CCCC was established in 2005 from the merger of China Harbour Engineering Company Group and China Road and Bridge Group (CRBC). The latter was in 2009 debarred for eight years by the World Bank for fraudulent practices under Phase 1 of the Philippines National Roads Improvement and Management Project.

In 2011 The World Bank announced that CCCC as the designated successor entity to CRBC are subject to the same sanctions applied to the original firm. Under the sanction, CCCC and all its subsidiaries is ineligible to engage in any road and bridge projects financed by the World Bank Group until January 12, 2017.

CCCC build roads, bridges, tunnels, railways and ports. It is China biggest dredger company and second globally, and it is the worlds biggest producer of container cranes with a market share of more than 78 percent.

The Chinese company is number 10 on the top 225 list on international contractors, just behind Swedish Skanska.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *