[The cooling of enthusiasm for China’s investments mirrors the unease of incoming governments in Sri Lanka, Malaysia and Maldives, where new administrations have come to power wary of Chinese deals struck by their predecessors.]
“Their predecessors got the bribes, but the new governments got the bills.”
Well said.
Going forward, it is going to be harder to get away with the bribes, now that conventional wisdom has changed.
Before, politicians looked like they smart shoppers getting lower prices when they went with China. Increasingly, the assumption is that they took bribes.
“The Chinese will discover, as others have before them, that loan documents to these countries are not worth the paper they’re printed on.”
The communist princelings themselves make even those third world s**tholes look like pikers, when it comes to fraudulent debt.
I think it would be average for the assets of any such project to be carried simultaneously on the books of at least three different Chinese businesses or banks.