(Reuters) – The mysterious Chinese businessman behind a $40 billion plan to build a canal through Nicaragua pledged transparency on Tuesday — but refused to reveal where he attended college.<\/p>\n
Wang Jing, 40, who says his initial wealth came from a gold mine investment in Cambodia, is the only public face for a project that on paper would challenge the Panama Canal’s monopoly on transporting oil, ore and containers between Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico ports and Asian markets.<\/p>\n
Nicaragua’s Congress last week granted Wang’s Cayman Islands-registered HKND company a 50-year concession to develop the canal, following a September agreement with president Daniel Ortega. HKND in turn is a unit of HK Nicaragua Canal Development Investment Co., Ltd, a firm Wang had registered in Hong Kong just a month before the deal with Ortega.<\/p>\n
Wang denied any family connection to the Chinese government, military or ruling Communist Party. Connections, or guanxi, are often the hidden ingredient behind sudden success in China.<\/p>\n
“I always hoped people would pay attention to the project and not to me personally,” he told a news conference at a luxury hotel in central Beijing.<\/p>\n
“I am a very normal Chinese citizen. I couldn’t be more normal.”<\/p>\n
The plan – which has generated a lot of skepticism from industry experts – is to build a 286-km (178-mile) canal connecting the Caribbean with the Pacific via Lake Nicaragua, Central America’s largest freshwater lake.<\/p>\n
It would cost about four years’ worth of Nicaragua’s annual gross domestic product, and would likely be three times longer than the Panama Canal, which took a decade to build.<\/p>\n
Speaking later in an interview with Reuters, Wang said HKND would head a consortium of partners that would operate “fairly, impartially and openly” and might include international firms.<\/p>\n
It would be financed by large Chinese and international banks that he declined to name, although he said financing negotiations were going smoothly.<\/p>\n
A likely partner is China Railway Construction, one of the country’s largest state-owned infrastructure developers, according to HKND materials promoting the project. Another of Wang’s companies, the unlisted Xinwei Telecom Enterprise Group, signed a cooperation accord with China Railway earlier this year.<\/p>\n