Wed, November 04, 2009
Chinese enterprises must fully assess the unfamiliar investment environments of overseas projects before buying into them, a Chinese international law expert warned Tuesday after a walkout in a Greek port and the shooting of Chinese employees in Peru.
Dockers at the main Greek port of Piraeus launched a new 48-hour strike midnight on Monday against the lease of container facilities to Chinese transport operator China Ocean Shipping (Group) Company (COSCO).
Greece's previous conservative government signed a 35-year concession of Piraeus' docks to COSCO last year, expecting to bring a guaranteed premium of 3.4 billion euros ($5 billion) and boost the port's capacity by 250 percent. The Greek parliament approved the concession by a 149-131 vote in March.
Greece's port employees federation, which wants the deal scrapped, said the government had failed to give assurances on labor relations, and the extent of future state control over the facilities.
The union staged a 17-day strike last month that shut down the port's container facilities, causing a massive goods holdup in one of Mediterranean's busiest harbors.
Strikers fear that the new operators will force massive layoffs and that the influx of cheap Chinese goods will undermine the already shaky Greek family-owned store sector, according to AFP.
Li Keqiang, chief representative of COSCO in Greece, sounded frustrated and declined an interview with the Global Times Tuesday, saying only that the "strike started last night."
Christos Failadis, press counselor of the Greek embassy in Beijing, told the Global Times by e-mail that, "In market economies like Greece, strikes are a constitutional right."
"But there is a great possibility, if the government brings the case to the Constitutional Court, that the latter may declare the strike illegal on behalf of public interest. Although such a move could be characterized as 'authoritative,'" he added.
And separately, about 15 to 20 gunmen invaded Chinese miner Zijin's Rio Blanco copper project in Peru on Sunday, shooting dead two security guards.
"This was evidently an act of terror, of violence," Wu Jian, a director at Rio Blanco, said on Canal N TV on Monday. "It would not surprise me if there are political and economic interests at play to scare investment away – to create an image of political instability."
Police were still collecting evidence Tuesday from the attack.
But critics attributed it to the ignorance of the Peruvian government on environmental concerns in the push to attract foreign investment.
Xue Lei, an international law researcher at the Shanghai Institutes for International Studies, told the Global Times Tuesday that Chinese companies doing business abroad will have to pay more attention to local business issues, particularly labor relations and environment protection, which haven't been given as much thought in China.
