US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has received a letter from the House Foreign Affairs Committee chairman warning that a tender by President Javier Milei in Argentina to upgrade a pivotal waterway risks being won by a consortium that he alleges maintains ties to China.
US Representative Brian Mast wrote to Rubio on April 23, alerting him of “a troubling development regarding Chinese malign influence,” according to a copy of the letter seen by Bloomberg News.
The winner of the 25-year tender will need to invest US$10 billion, making it one of Milei’s most important auctions.
Without providing specific details, Mast accused Jan de Nul NV, a Belgian dredger that’s maintained the Parana River since the 1990s, of having “deep and ongoing links” with Chinese state-owned companies through its Argentine partner Servimagnus SA.
Servimagnus says that while it has worked with CCCC Shanghai Dredging Co in the past, it has no current ties to that company or other Chinese state-run entities.
In a statement, Jan de Nul said its bid made clear it would hire US technology if it won the tender, and that the allegations of China ties “are absolutely false and malicious.” Instead, Jan de Nul says its top competitor in the tender, rival Belgian dredger DEME Group NV, included a Chinese supplier regarding its security cameras.
“The public tender process is transparent, with mechanisms in place to challenge the process. To date, and to our knowledge, no participant has filed any of such objections,” Jan de Nul said in its statement.
DEME and the US State Department’s press office declined to comment. A spokesperson for Mast didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Mast’s letter comes to light after the competing consortium, composed of DEME and US investors including KKR & Co, complained to the White House last week that the tender is skewed in favour of Jan de Nul.
Both DEME and Jan de Nul have worked with Chinese firms in other regions before.
Mast claimed that Beijing is breaching a condition of the tender set by Milei’s administration that excludes state-owned companies from bidding – widely seen as an attempt to block Chinese participation.
“Awarding the contract to Jan de Nul would allow the PRC to circumvent that choice through a private-sector proxy,” he wrote.
Reuters reported on the letter earlier Thursday.
The letter demonstrates the extent to which the tender to deepen the Parana’s shipping lane, the exit route for almost all of Argentina’s vast soy and grain exports, has become a focal point for the Trump administration’s efforts to reestablish US influence in Latin America after years of seeing China gain ground.
Underscoring Argentina’s growing role under Milei as a “strong ally” of the US, Mast said that if the La Libertad Avanza leader was “made fully aware of the evidence of the PRC’s extensive connections to Jan de Nul, I am confident he will take appropriate action.”
by Jonathan Gilbert & Manuela Tobias, Bloomberg
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