BEIJING (TIP): China has offered to invest USD 3.7 billion in Sri Lanka, stated to be the biggest-ever foreign investment in the island nation, to build a state-of-the-art oil refinery as the two countries signed a new plan to upgrade BRI cooperation during Sri Lankan President Anura Kumara Dissanayake’s state visit here.
On Thursday, Dissanayake met Chinese Premier Li Qiang and Chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress Zhao Leji and pitched for more Chinese investment in his address to Chinese firms.
A day earlier, Dissanayake held talks with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping following which the two sides signed 15 agreements.
According to a press release by the Sri Lankan President’s media division, his visit marked a significant milestone by securing the largest foreign direct investment to date of USD 3.7 billion Chinese investment to build a state-of-the-art oil refinery at Hambantota.
“This significant achievement was formalised this morning with the signing of an agreement between Sri Lanka’s Ministry of Energy and Sinopec, a leading Chinese international petroleum corporation,” it said.
The refinery will have a capacity of two lakh barrels. China has secured the strategic Hambantota port in the Indian Ocean on a 99-year lease as a debt swap. It has also secured a long-term lease to build an economic zone at Hambantota.
Dissanayake incidentally was a critic of the Hambantota port deal for its long-term lease while he was in the opposition.
It was seen as a balancing act as last year India and Sri Lanka inked a deal to jointly develop 85 Word War II-era oil storage tanks at the strategic Trincomalee port in the eastern region of the country.
Asked for his reactions to Sinopec deal with Sri Lanka at a media briefing here, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun said high-quality Belt and Road cooperation and exchanges and collaboration in various fields have delivered fruitful results.
“China and Sri Lanka today have a historic opportunity to build on what has been achieved and take the relationship into the next chapter. It is important to view bilateral relations from a strategic perspective and jointly build a China-Sri Lanka community with a shared future,” he said. As Dissanayake concluded his visit, his second foreign tour after his last month’s visit to New Delhi where he committed not to allow Sri Lanka’s territory to be used against the interest of India, there is no word from both sides yet. (PTI)
Nepal‘s top court bars infrastructure in protected areas
Kathmandu (TIP): Nepal’s Supreme Court has scrapped controversial laws allowing hydropower and hotel projects in protected nature reserves, a lawyer said on January 16, calling it a win for the Himalayan republic’s conservationists. A fifth of Nepal’s lands are designated as protected areas. But both hydropower projects and tourism are major earners, and the government passed laws last year to allow infrastructure projects in national parks, forests and other conservation areas, except in highly sensitive zones. “The controversial decision was made with deception,” environmental advocate Padam Bahadur Shrestha, one of the petitioners challenging the changes to the law, told AFP.
“It clearly shows how our government is working just to appease investors because it lacks farsightedness.”
Shrestha said that the verdict, which was issued on Wednesday, offers “justice to preserve ecology and biodiversity”. Kathmandu has been praised worldwide for its efforts to protect wildlife, allowing it to bring several species back from the brink of local extinction, including tigers and rhinos. Nepal’s protected habitat laws have helped to triple its tiger population to 355 since 2010 and to increase one-horned rhinoceros from around 100 in the 1960s to 752 in 2021.
After decades of rampant logging, Nepal also nearly doubled its forest cover between 1992 and 2016.
“The laws should have never been passed,” said Rampreet Yadav, former chief conservation officer of Chitwan National Park, Nepal’s most important conservation area. “If development projects are allowed in protected areas, it will destroy our nature, it will destroy the habitats of animals.” Nepal is eager to develop its hydropower industry after a dam-building spree in the past two decades that has given it an installed capacity of more than 2,600 megawatts.
It signed deals with India and Bangladesh last year to export thousands of megawatts of hydroelectricity. Tourism is also a major earner for Nepal, which saw a million foreign visitors last year after a post-pandemic bounceback, with the government pumping investments into infrastructure including airports. (PTI)