Blackrock acquires the ports of the Panama Canal operated by CK Hutchison for 21,650 million

A consortium led by the American investor Blackrock has reached an agreement to acquire the subsidiary of a Hong Kong company that operates the two ports on both sides of the Panama Canal. The operation would leave the port management in both entries to the channel in American hands, at a time when Donald Trump has defended the need for the US conglomerate based in Hong Kong, under sovereignty of the Asian giant.

The Blackrock consortium includes the Swiss firm Terminal Investment and will disburse 23,000 million dollars for Hutchison Port Holdings and Hutchison Port Group Holdings, an operation for which it will take control of 43 ports in 23 countries. Among them, those of Balboa and Cristóbal in the entrances of the Panama Canal by the Pacific and the Caribbean, but also of others in Mexico, Australia, Pakistan, Holland or Egypt. The operation, which must now be approved by the Panama Government in relation to the ports of the Canal, does not include the company’s ports in China.

Blackrock reported the acquisition both to the Trump administration and Congress, according to a source close to the operation to ‘The Wall Street Journal’. According to Frank Sixt, executive director of CK Hutchison, the operation is the result of a “competitive process with several offers,” he said in a statement. “I want to emphasize that the transaction is purely commercial and totally detached from political information related to the ports of Panama,” he added.

Despite this statement, it is impossible not to notice the political draft of the operation. The control of the Panama Canal has been one of Trump’s insistence since before arriving at the White House, within a new expansionist ambition that includes the intention of acquiring Greenland, of annexing Canada or of turning Gaza into a tourist resort under US control.

Of all these bets, to recover the channel is the one that has been taken more seriousness. The first trip of Trump’s Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, had a stop in Panama. There he warned its president, José Raúl Mulino that Panama had to end China’s influence on the channel or face US reprisals.

The operation could be enough for Trump not to move forward with his threat of keeping the channel, which was built by the US at the beginning of the 20th century and was delivered to the Caribbean country in the 1970s by the then President Jimmy Carter, in an agreement very criticized by the New York billionaire.