Der in China gebaute Flughafen in Nepal war mit Korruption übersät, die Untersuchung findet fest

SS: In a 36-page report released Thursday, a parliamentary committee’s investigation into the airport in Pokhara found that China CAMC Engineering, the construction arm of a state-owned conglomerate, Sinomach, had failed to pay taxes, had not finished the project to specification and had used poor-quality construction, all because of corruption and a lack of oversight.The airport was built with a 20-year loan from the Export-Import Bank of China, a state-owned lender that finances Beijing’s overseas development work. Nepal must soon start repaying the loan using the profits generated by the airport, which opened in 2023. The airport has fallen well short of its projections for international passengers. There is only one weekly international route landing in Pokhara.

China celebrated the airport’s construction as a “flagship project” of its Belt and Road Initiative, President Xi Jinping’s signature infrastructure campaign, which has doled out an estimated $1 trillion in loans and grants to other countries.But Nepal has quietly rejected that designation, because it has complicated diplomatic ties with India, its neighbor and rival to China for influence in the region. India, a major destination for Nepali travelers, has not approved any international routes to Pokhara. In some of those cases, Nepal’s civil aviation authority was forced to pay for items that CAMC failed to deliver as promised. The report also stated that Nepali authorities had waived $16 million in taxes for CAMC, even though the contract stated that the company was obligated to pay customs duties and value-added tax on equipment imported from China.