A year ago, the Port of Hamburg signed a deal with Chinese partners for the partial sale of a terminal. Now the deal is in danger of collapsing. Right in the middle of the mess is Chancellor Olaf Scholz.
The container terminal in Tollerort is the smallest loading station in the port of Hamburg, which has four terminals in total, and it’s quite in the corner, at the back near the Köhlbrand Bridge. But the small terminal is currently causing a lot of trouble.
And that’s trouble that Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) has to endure. The reason: A long-standing business partner of the Hamburg port operator, who comes from China of all places, is to buy 35 percent of this terminal. And Scholz is behind the deal. So far anyway.
The deal was almost a done deal before it became a political issue. The supervisory board of the Hamburg port operator HHLA had already approved it. Andreas Rieckhoff, a close confidant of Chancellor Olaf Scholz from their days in Hamburg, is on the committee. Both have trusted each other since their time in the SPD district of Hamburg Altona.
The “Hamburger Abendblatt” knows a photo of a vacation in Spain they spent together in the 1990s. When Scholz became mayor in Hamburg, he brought Rieckhoff into the economic authority as a state councillor. Since 2020, the Chancellor’s friend has been a representative of the Hanseatic city on the HHLA Supervisory Board.
He is a kind of Hanseatic multi-supervisory board: He is involved in the Hanseatic city’s airport as well as on the supervisory board of the trade fair, the tourism GmbH and the center for aviation research. According to his CV, the busy State Councilor and Scholz confidant is on eight supervisory boards, six of them as chairman.
He agreed when it came last year that China’s COSCO Shipping Ports Limited (CSPL) should get “a strategic stake” in Container Terminal Tollerort, according to a September 2021 joint statement.
One sees in this “a strengthening of the customer relationship with the Chinese partner as well as sustainable planning security for the container terminal”, is the assessment from last autumn. Tollerort should become the preferred transhipment point for the Chinese.
Angela Titzrath, head of HHLA, said at the signing of the contract that “long-term and trusting customer relationships” such as those the port has cultivated in goods traffic with China for 40 years are important. She reminded that Chinese freighters have been handled at the terminal for four decades.
The Port of Hamburg has actually been the most important logistical hub for maritime and continental goods traffic between China and Europe for decades. Almost every third container that crosses the quay in Hamburg comes from China or is destined for the Chinese market.
The partnership was intended to “strengthen Hamburg’s position as a logistics hub in Europe’s northern range and in relation to the Baltic Sea region”.
Titzrath’s Chinese contractual partner Zhang Dayu, head of CSPL, agreed: “We look forward to developing the existing potential together with our partner HHLA and successfully developing the location further.”
Nobody is happy anymore. Because what was true a year ago is a thing of the past given the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The new slogan in the EU and in Germany, painfully learned through the consequences of energy dependence on Russia, is “decoupling”.
In German: decoupling. The economy in this country should not only be dependent on one main partner – and that is not just about Russia, but also about China as a production and sales market. In view of these effects of what Scholz himself called the “turn of the era”, a deal like the one in Hamburg is no longer a good idea these days.
Demands for the deal, which seemed to have already been concluded, to be dropped after all: For example, Green co-boss Omid Nouripour says: “In the war over Ukraine we learned that dependencies on states like Russia and China are extremely dangerous be able.”
We should “learn from these mistakes”. FDP General Secretary Bijan Djir-Sarai, Federal Justice Minister Marco Buschmann (FDP) and Economics Minister Robert Habeck (Greens) made similar statements. They all warned against repeating mistakes of the past.
Only at the beginning of the week did the Presidents of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution and the Federal Intelligence Service in the Bundestag warn of possible threats from China. Russia is the storm, China is the climate change that we have to adapt to, said the President of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Thomas Haldenwang.
That sounds very different from last year, when the completion of the deal seemed to depend only on formalities. At the time, there was talk of “various approvals under competition law and foreign trade law”. However, they could now become decisive.
The deadline for the investment review process that was initiated at the time expires on October 31. This was confirmed by a spokesman for the Federal Ministry of Economics. An extension of the deadline would be possible if all parties agree. If the deadline is not extended and if there is no cabinet decision, this is de facto approval and the deal is done.
However, it doesn’t look like that. Because Scholz, who already has to answer to a committee of inquiry because of his Hamburg connections to the Cum-Ex fraudsters of the Warburg Bank, does not want to be drawn into the next maelstrom of Hamburg merchant clan, who threatens in view of his acquaintance with the port supervisory board member Rieckhoff.
After an EU summit in Brussels, he said more cautiously than usual about the deal at the weekend: “Nothing has been decided yet”. In the test procedure, “so many questions still have to be clarified that there is currently no intermediate status to report .”
The whole thing sounds a bit like Nord Stream 2: Shortly after his election as chancellor, Scholz said that the question of commissioning was a purely economic matter and that he shied away from responsibility.
A short time later he revised this view and ultimately made the commissioning politically impossible. Putin’s Russia looked into the empty tube. It could be that China’s head of state Xi Jinping will soon have this experience with Scholz and the Germans.
More about the port deal in Hamburg:
The way for the controversial Chinese participation in a container terminal in the port of Hamburg is now clear. As the “Süddeutsche Zeitung” reports, the six ministries that had previously rejected the deal have given up their resistance. Experts warn of the deal.
Olaf Scholz waved the port of Hamburg’s China deal through. In the traffic light, the Liberals and Greens find it next to it. But what is just beginning in Hamburg has already become a tradition in another German city. Duisburg is Germany’s “China City”. And should it remain so according to the will of the state government. is that wise
The article “Scholz involved even more deeply in the China deal around the port of Hamburg than expected” comes from WirtschaftsKurier.
