Nicaragua Canal Concessioner Wang Jing’s Fortune Takes Another Hit

He’s off both Forbes and Bloomberg’s lists of the leading multimillionaires

By Mabel Calero  (La Prensa)

HAVANA TIMES – The great wealth flaunted by Chinese magnate Wang Jing, who at one time had planned to build an inter-oceanic canal in Nicaragua, has evaporated.  His fortune has shrunk to the point where he no longer appears on Forbes magazine’s list of multi-millionaires, nor on the Bloomberg’s index.

According to Forbes, Wang Jing, the mysterious owner of the Chinese company Hong Kong- Nicaragua Canal Development Investment Co. (HKND), first appeared on the multimillionaire’s list in 2014, but the last time was in 2018, when his accumulated wealth was estimated at 905 million dollars.

2018 was precisely the same year that the crisis exploded in Nicaragua, provoking its current economic disaster. Apparently, it wasn’t a good year for the Chinese tycoon either, who was affected by the stock market drop in Hong Kong, according to the Bloomberg news agency.

In 2018, Wang Jing was still listed as number 376 on the list of the richest people in China, and number 1,650 of the world’s multimillionaires.

The magazine mentions two things that stood out in the businessman’s fortune: one, that he presided over the Beijing Xinwei Telecom Technology Group, listed in Shanghai; and two, that “Wang has had a great impact in the last years with an audacious plan to construct a fifty billion dollar canal in Nicaragua, although progress has slowed down in the last years.”

A murky figure

For Francisca Ramirez, the farm leader who defended tooth and nail the lands that would have been ripped away from the local producers for the construction of the inter-oceanic canal, Wang Jing was a murky and mysterious person who had colluded with Daniel Ortega.

“You could see that the canal was merely a façade in order to take our lands away. They wanted to take the best land, but they never dispossessed us. Now we’ve won that battle, because the law said that if in six years none of the contemplated projects were completed, the law would be left invalid,” Ramirez said.

The rural leader who had to go into exile in Costa Rica as a result of the political persecution that was unleashed in Nicaragua in 2018, accuses Wang Jing of having no intention of really constructing the megaproject of the century. “We don’t know what his arrangement was, but the canal was a fake project. I think that if he’d been a serious businessman. he wouldn’t have fallen into Ortega’s game.”

2018 a bad year for Wang Jing

The Asian tycoon not only fell off the Forbes list, but also disappeared from the Bloomberg index of multimillionaires, which is a daily classification of the richest people in the world.

In April 2018 the Bloomberg news agency announced that the HKND Enterprise, property of the Chinese magnate, had ended its rental contract for the suites it occupied on the eighteenth floor of Hong Kong’s International Financial Center.

The company had renewed its lease for these offices in January 2016 for a three-year period ending in 2019 but declined the option of extending it for another three years.  The monthly cost of these suites was initially for 2.1 million Hong Kong dollars.