Sins of the Chinese company building the Bogotá metro in other parts of the world

China Harbor Engineering, which won the mayor's bid, has been hit with bribes and delays in work in Malaysia, India and the Philippines.

The Chinese from the Harbor Engineering Company, the same people building the first line of the Bogotá metro, are in the Ugandan government's sights. The thing is that they were responsible for the standard gauge railway that would connect the capital of that country, Kampala, with Malaba, the border city with Kenya, but three years after signing the commitments, those promises were broken with the company that is building the Bogotá metro.

This is a bad precedent for a company with questions in Colombia. According to an article in Semana that would implicate Angelica Lozano, something he denied Private Chinese company.

A Chinese company, a company with traditions

Reliability was the main support for the company to win the Bogota Metro tender. At the beginning of the 21st century, the giant China Communications Construction Company Ltd (CCCC) was formed from the merger between China Road and Bridge Corporation and China Harbor Engineering Company. It was a successful union that made it one of the largest industries in the world in 2012, according to the Fortune Global 500.

However, he did not stop having moles. As a result of irregularities in the implementation of a construction contract in the Philippines, in 2009 it was placed on the World Bank's blacklist accused of fraudulent practices. The Philippine National Highway Improvement and Management Project was completed seven years ago.

This is not the only case in which employment practices at the giant CCCC and its subsidiaries have been called into question. In the year the World Bank ban took effect, the same Chinese road and bridge company allegedly paid $19 million to Teodorin Nguema, the son of the president of Equatorial Guinea, to win a contract to build the roads. Teodorin was convicted in absentia on October 27, 2017 by the French judiciary on charges of seizing tens of millions of euros in public funds from his country and laundering this money in France.

A few years before that, in 2010, the president of Malaysia at the time, Mahinda Rajapaksa, awarded them a contract to build a port in the Hambantota region, and as a result of this process, an investigation arose to find out why they had done so. It transferred $8.1 million to the president’s closest team.

In 2011, another scandal erupted when courts in Bangladesh found that they had paid bribes to the son of former Prime Minister Khaleda Zia, in order to win the highway expansion. The accused spent six years in prison.

China Harbor Engineering Company has been present in Colombia since 2015 as part of the Autopistas Urabá concession, where it owns 25%, but where another 40% is controlled by other CCCC subsidiaries, China Harbor Concessions Company from Spain and China Harbor Concessions Company from Bermuda. In addition, the Colombian companies Termotécnica (5%), Unidad de Infraestructura y Construcciones (15%), SP Ingenieros (15%) are part of the consortium responsible for the construction of 4G, Autopista al Mar 2.

This company is responsible for the successful completion of the construction of the first line of the Bogotá Metro.