Port of Hamburg: German government allows limited access from Chinese Spotify grows and grows: targets 200 million subscribers

The German government has granted the Chinese state shipping company Cosco limited access to the operating company of a container terminal in the port of Hamburg. According to government news agency Reuters, the federal cabinet approved a so-called partial ban on Wednesday.

Instead of taking a 35 percent stake in the Tollerort container terminal of the Hamburg port logistics group HHLA, the federal government now only approves a 24.9 percent stake for the Chinese.

Cosco approval pending

The partial ban should prevent strategic participation and reduce participation to purely financial participation, it was said in advance. Among other things, the acquiring company should be prohibited from having contractual veto rights over strategic business or personnel decisions. It may also not appoint members of the board of directors. It is not yet clear whether Cosco agrees to the compromise.

The compromise is controversial in the traffic light coalition. Impressed by recent experience with Russia and its reliance on its gas supply, a political dispute arose over whether to allow Chinese participation. Federal Economy Minister Robert Habeck (Greens) warned of new dependencies and wanted to completely ban Chinese access. Other ministries also wanted this.

Scholz: Many questions need clarification

Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD), who will travel to China in early November, recently emphasized that nothing has been decided yet and that many questions remain to be answered. He also pointed out that it was not about the sale of the port. The land itself is 100 percent owned by the Hanseatic city of Hamburg.

The Cosco Group also operates the world’s fourth largest container shipping company. Their ships have been calling at the Tollerort terminal for more than 40 years. In exchange for the interest, Cosco wants to make Container Terminal Tollerort (CTT) a preferred transhipment point in Europe. Terminal shares of shipping companies are common in global container logistics. In Europe alone, Cosco already owns shares in eight terminals.

Trittin: ‘This makes you a bit economically blackmailable’

The chairman of the Young Liberals in the FDP, Franziska Brandmann, had asked the federal government and her own party before the cabinet decision to end Cosco’s planned participation in the terminal in the port of Hamburg. Everything else is also unfortunate for the FDP. “It has become painfully clear that the grand coalition is acting too naively in its dealings with Russia and has made Germany dependent on energy policy as a result,” Brandmann told the “Redaktionsnetzwerk Deutschland” (Wednesday). This “safety policy naivety” must come to an end with the traffic light government.

Jürgen Trittin, the Greens’ foreign policy spokesman in the Bundestag, called the compromise solution in the Bayern media group’s newspapers a “damage mitigation” as “the conversion of a strategic stake into a financial one” is now planned.

“But you have to realize that there are already Chinese companies in the direct competitors of the port of Hamburg, such as in Rotterdam and Antwerp. As a result, you are being blackmailed a bit economically’, says Trittin. He called for “European regulations for such cases, otherwise each member state will do its own thing – and then be played off against each other from Beijing”.

sources

(dsc/t online)