So what do you think about Malta heading down the road as China’s stooge in the EU?
I was taking a break when all this happened, so let’s have this discussion now.
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Reuters
China to gain solar foothold in EU with Malta stake buy
Wed Sep 11 07:15:29 UTC 2013
VALLETTA (Reuters) – China Power Investments is to take a minority stake in Malta energy supplier Enemalta Corporation, Maltese Prime Minister Joseph Muscat said on Wednesday, in a move that gives the Chinese firm an EU foothold in producing photo-voltaic units.
In the largest trade dispute between the European Union and China, EU companies accuse Chinese rivals of benefiting from unfair state aid and selling about 21 billion euros ($27.86 billion) worth of solar panels in Europe last year.
The dispute threatened a wider trade war in goods from wine to steel until Brussels and Beijing agreed a minimum price for panels from China in late July and eased tensions.
China Power and Enemalta plan to set up a joint venture to produce photo-voltaic units in Malta for sale in the EU. Roof-top photo-voltaic units convert energy from the sun into electricity.
Enemalta is currently fully owned by the Maltese government and has a monopoly in the supply of electricity in Malta. It is laboring under a debt burden of 800 million euros which has dented its credit rating.
The Times of Malta newspaper quoted unnamed sources as saying the Chinese company would make an investment of 200 million euros.
The agreement was announced following a meeting between Muscat and his Chinese counterpart Li Keqiang in the city of Dalian, China.
(Reporting by Chris Scicluna; editing by Jason Neely)
The following pictures are not Reuters, but were released by the Malta government’s Department of Information. This was the accompanying press release pr1897eng
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Muscat has no ideas of his own so what else can he do?
We have to hope the details don’t shaft the rest of us.
HOPE?
How about raising hell about what’s being done in your name?
Hammer down the door of your MP and get him/her to ask questions in parliament.
Write to Muscat to demand an explanation and register your objections.
Don’t hope for things to go your way if you do nothing about it yourself.
What does it matter what we think? The government will have its way regardless. Even the PN government used to do it.
Baxxter, thought you would start with a critique of their dress style.
Just look at the second picture, and the shoes them two are wearing.
The Chinese representative of China Power Investments Corporation is wearing slip ons. It shows how he treated his meeting with Muscat as a casual meeting with that guy from Malta. It is not a good starting sign: it shows how they will be treating the Maltese in general.
And is Joseph Muscat wearing those black Chelsea boots he sported at the Eden Arena when he launched the Tana Lkoll electoral programme?
http://daphnecaruanagalizia.com/2013/02/elasticated-ankle-boots-with-a-suit-sorry-ankilbwiez-with-a-sjut/
And why is the signature not done between persons of equivalent rank? Why is the Minister of the ‘Republic of Malta’ made to sign with an officer of an entity owned by the Chinese government? Should it not be the Chairman of Enemalta signing on the Maltese side, or the Chinese Minister in charge of China Power on the other side?
Not happy with it. For obvious reasons.
All I know is that TVM seems to be sponsored by Communist China now. All I see are programmes promoting and completely airbrushing China, which of course – if people need reminding – is an oppressive country that commits the most outrageous human rights abuses and crushes all opposition in terrible ways.
PBS signed an agreement with China’s television corporation CCTV about a month ago.
Joseph Muscat will be addressing the UN later on this week.
Hope he makes a clear appeal to China to join the rest of western style democratic countries and respect human rights and dignity and to embrace democracy. This is how one stands up to be counted.
He should also take the opportunity to express an apology towards the UN for the way he threatened African immigrants with push-backs to Libya in violation of UNHCR rules. This is how one wakes up and smells the coffee.
And while on the subject, he should demand that Libya respects human rights too. I would personally rather buy oil at normal prices from Libya knowing that they respect human rights.
But I am not holding my breath.
Was Mrs. Konrad Mizzi’s new job part of the deal?
[Daphne – Small change, relatively. So no – Mrs Konrad Mizzi’s salary, rather than job, was a way of paying her husband more without getting ‘hames mitt ewro fil-gimgha’ headlines in the media.]
The money in this case is secondary……maybe a FAMILY TREE would solve all your answers.
She’s one of many, as we know.
Somebody should be totting up the cost of these and creating a new mantra. If 400 people have been given iced buns at an average €20000 per annum, that’s 40 million in 5 years. Bet you it could pay for quite a few of the schools for which Varist suddenly can’t find any money.
Put differently it’s €40,000,000 worth of bribery. Or €150,000 a week.
Hallikom minn ‘hames mitt ewro fil-gimgha zieda’, it should be:
‘il-gvern qed jonfoq mija u hamsin elf ewro fil-gimgha biex jixtri l-voti’
And that’s probably a conservative estimate.
Look at the fabric of Joseph’s trousers stretched fat-boy style over his thighs. Also, the gold watch showing over his cuffs. Hamallu piu di cos non si puo.
But to answer the question, yeah bloody brilliant. Why can’t we make friends with normal countries and stop being so weird?
I don’t want to know what percentage of Enemalta China is going to own, although I would rather it was 0.
I want to know how much of the Labour Party it ALREADY owns, and how much of their 2013 campaign China paid for, and how much of their 2018 campaign they will pay for. And that’s another thing that should become a weekly mantra:
“How much of you does China own, and how much will it spend on your 2018 campaign”
Try asking people who live in different European countries what they think of all the photo-voltaic sales that have been hitting their country-side regions:
Sales are targeted at stable rural families with an average income or pension: enough at any rate to sign a 20,000euro contract on the first direct contact with an agent.
Telephones ring on the dot at 1pm, 2pm, 3pm asking for the owner of the house: a relentless barrage of phone calls whether or not you are listed. The telephone call sets the appointment for the agent. The call centre has information about the amount of square meterage available for panels and whether or not this is South Facing. They claim to have these details from Google Earth but in fact the electricity companies and other partners provide all sorts of information.
Agents are primed to close the sale at the first meeting. Anything else is a waste of time because people will have otherwise invested too much thought into the matter.
One company sends the agents and closes the sale. The installation is done by another company. The after-sales service is meant to be handled by yet another company supposedly within the same group. It is futile asking for after-sales service because by the time it’s required the agent that sold the wonderful offer is no longer available. The number no longer works. Rural families abroad are not as internet connected as in Malta. It would not even enter their minds to carry out research on the company or to check online comments on quality. They are told that they will be selling back electricity to the electricity board. The sums don’t exactly round up the way they’re told they will. The poor things think they’ve made the deal of the century and would have already signed the guarantee forms for loans and all financing documents required at the first visit from the agent. Banks have partnering deals in place for the agents to sign with the package.
The last company I heard of that went bust on its third round of such activity leaving behind losses at this third round of 80 million euro saw its then freshly unemployed top agents nationwide promptly proceed to huddle up and start other mirror versions of the same groupings of companies to market the precise same offer with the often the same trusting targets offered a renewal offer. Such a break-off company boasted 50,000 euro of 1st day sales, fully aware that no after-sales post basic installation would ever take place as was carefully worded on the sales contract.
Chinese banks have financed such photo-voltaic manufacturing industries to considerable amounts. Chinese transparency being what it is, Chinese banks are aware that the accounts and figures reported back are not genuine and are expectant of a huge bubble bursting.
What exactly is Malta putting itself out for? yet another mega-con?
Chinese government investment in Europe is a fact of life, but the Enemalta deal is exceptional for a key reason – Enemalta is a monopoly.
In effect we are being forced to buy our electricity from the government of a country that uses arbitrary detention and torture, throws dissenters into prison, and applies the death penalty for non-violent crimes. Shame on you (part 1).
The grand scheme to turn Malta into an “energy exporter” is clearly just a tacky deal that was struck in order to by-pass EU dumping restrictions on Chinese solar panel manufacturers.
It will certainly be too expensive to manufacture the PV cells here, so all Malta will have is an assembly line for people on minimum wages to cobble together crates of manufactured components shipped from China. Shame on you (part 2)!
Exactly, we’ll be the packing centre, couple of stickers to give them the CE mark and job done.
Ruffjani daqs il-Labour ghad irid johloq. U harja f’wicc dawk kollha li investew flushom f’xi R&D.
A truce called for this summer asked for the EU’s study into the matter, following an ongoing war of words, judging by the findings confirming the allegations, it seems Muscat couldn’t get his agreement at a worst possible time.
He may have to rethink his strategy in December, the industry’s determined not to let this one pass, even because jobs have been lost consistently to underhand tactics eating away at Europe’s inner fabric.
Given that China seems to adopt this method to make inroads in the Caucasus with its oil supplies and North Africa literally colonised, it’s doubtful whether Muscat can manage to get Europe to ‘smell the coffee’ this time round.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-08-28/eu-says-probe-finds-chinese-solar-panel-makers-got-subsidies.html
Prime Minister Joseph Muscat had a golden opportunity to bring up the subject of human rights in China when he met the Chinese Premier last week.
Muscat and Labour sold Malta’s soul to the hunters, the taxi-drivers, the monti hawkers, the gamblers, the land speculators, to the Chinese, and who knows to who else. And Muscat thumbs his nose at the imbeciles who voted him in. He and his coterie of friends are having a ball at their, and unfortunately our, expense.
The circus of mads, fads and bads forcing their version of life on us. An abundance of grotesquely subverted revelry.
Daphne, I have already shared some thoughts on the subject, under the Ray Azzopardi (Ambassador to Belgium) post. Please allow me to elaborate a bit by way of reading between the lines of recent events…
1. As had been predicted during the electoral campaign, Joseph Muscat has just bailed-out Enemalta and Malta from definitive bankruptcy which only he and his roadmap (which we were told had been “kostid”) would have led them into. He himself made this bailout clear when he spoke to the Maltese media in China, referring to what he described as financial doom at Enemalta. And on “Iswed fuq l-Abjad” on Net TV in the same week, Leo Brincat could not think of any strategic reasons for the MOU other than Enemalta’s debt and loss-making situation.
Enemalta’s situation would get better if Enemalta does not burden itself with further unnecessary investments or commitments and/or with unsustainable reductions in its tariffs.
But Joseph Muscat wants to commit Enemalta to a contract with an estimated cost of around Euro 600 million with private third parties under which the private sector will deliver the infrastructure within 2 years and Enemalta will, for the long term (20-25 years), buy electricity at prices which, we are now told, can only be committed at a fixed level for 5 years. Since no commitment will be sought for the price of power in the remaining years of the contract, Enemalta would expose itself to price increases and indeed, it is very likely that the contractors will start with a low price but then recover all losses of the first five years in the subsequent years.
Based on pre-elections information, the project is likely to cost somewhere in the region of Euro 600 million. On its part, the private sector provider can only enter into this contract if it commits to deliver the infrastructure in the very short term – the government wants this project operational in 2 years (“doable,” they said). Therefore, the private operator would have to find finance of up to Euro 600 million for the next 2 years. It is clear that this would require some syndication of international banks, but that no bank would commit to fund such project when the return is over 20-25 years and when a deal is being made with a corporation that would be bankrupted by the same project.
Hence I can imagine the pressure that the bidders must have made with Enemalta (and the government) about this point during the negotiations to-date. “Enemalta’s financial position needs to be strengthened before it can commit to this crazy project that would only lead it to its bankruptcy.”
Which is why I am not surprised that the final 3 bids have only been received after the signing of the MOU in China. There would have been no final bids if such agreement with China was not signed, trust me. (But that does not mean that I am excluding that it was all part of a plan, to cover the bankers behind the bids).
2. If Joseph Muscat has valued 35% (roughly one third – based on information revealed by Edward Zammit Lewis) of Enemalta’s share capital at Euro 200 million, then according to Muscat, 100% of Enemalta’s share capital is worth Euro 600 million. Deduct from that figure Enemalta’s debt, which according to Muscat amounts to Euro 800 million, and you are left with a hole of Euro 200 million. In simple terms this means that if I were to ask Joseph Muscat to sell me Enemalta today, he would give me Enemalta plus Euro 200 million in cash in return for nothing on my part. I could then sell 100% of Enemalta’s share capital to China for Euro 600 million, and use the total cash in my pockets of Euro 800 million to pay off its debt, and voila, it’s all settled.
Joseph Muscat has just sold the strategic monopoly lifeblood of our economy on the cheap. Very cheap. Scandaliciously cheap.
3. Joseph Muscat has just sold a significant stake in a monopolistic lifeblood provider of our economy to a foreign non-EU sovereign communist and non-democratic state whose seat of government is on the other side of the world, in a different time-zone, and whose language is completely different from ours. One can imagine the political, cultural and communications problems this is going to create to the Enemalta management and to government and local regulators.
4. Joseph Muscat is playing an old Mintoffian game – that of seeking to annoy the western democratic EU bloc by associating himself with undemocratic dictator states. Mintoff did this with Libya’s Gaddafi, North Korea’s Kim Il Sung, China’s Mao Tse Tung, and Romania’s Caucescu among others. Muscat is clearly not aware of one of Macchiavelli’s teachings that if one brings in a foreign power, this will eventually take him over.
5. The involvement of the Chinese government in Enemalta means that in future, no Maltese government will be able to make any commitments or controls on electricity prices for the Maltese public without the consent of the communist and dictatorial government of China. China will henceforth regulate the price of electricity in Malta. The Maltese electorate will be loosing the (political) sovereignty not only over the production of electricity, but also on its price.
And since Muscat is handing over control over the monopolistic operator, it will be very difficult for the sector to be liberalised, because it will be very hard for any private operator to start up afresh here.
Gass down ghal-gol hajt indeed.