Euromoney Alternative Awards: The Matt Damon in “Downsizing” Award for Shrinking Your Bank
1 January, 2018
Euromoney Alternative Awards: The Thinking Outside the Sandbox While Boiling the Ocean Award for Corporate Speak
1 January, 2018Euromoney, January 2018
See the whole Euromoney Alternative Awards here
China Development Bank, White Rock Wind Farm, Australia
England Tablelands in the rural north of Australia’s New South Wales, has a few claims to fame.
It is the home of the native Ngarabal people, whose name for the place means ‘plenty of big round stones’.
It hosts the annual Land of the Beardies festival and, in a not unrelated development, a fiercely contested beard-growing competition where the metrics for success are length, width and unruliness of beard.
To these fine accolades can be added another trophy: the most tenuous project to be linked to China’s Belt and Road Initiative.
There is fine sport to be had in watching international commercial banks try to swing a link between any piece of infrastructure development and the BRI. There are commonly agreed to be 65 Belt and Road countries including China, so there is a fair degree of latitude here, but nonetheless it is not unusual to see banks touting deals well outside them, from South Africa to Spain.
Australia, though? Not a classic trading route back in days of the Silk Road, principally because nobody knew it was there (bar people like the Ngarabal, of course). China’s state literature puts places as diverse as Albania and Egypt on the map but not Oz.
What is interesting about the White Rock Wind Farm, 20 kilometres west of Glen Innes next to Furracabad Creek, is that it is one of the deals that China Development Bank put forward when asked by Euromoney to illustrate the strength of Belt and Road.
CDB is a policy lender: it doesn’t have to convince anyone of its Belt and Road credentials. CDB highlights it because the bank funded it alongside Australia’s big four banks, a sign of cooperation between the public and private sectors.
Fine. But now we fear it is open season and every Australian bank will be putting forward Tasmanian treasury bonds as Belt and Road deals.
Full article: https://www.euromoney.com/article/b15ycp8w61676n/alternative-awards-of-the-year-2017#belt?copyrightInfo=true
