China's state-owned engineering company CMEC will modernize Tajikistan's flagship aluminum smelter in a $545 million deal, a representative for the smelter told AFP Friday.A representative for Talco confirmed to AFP via telephone that "the contract between CMEC (China Machinery Engin-eering Corporation) and Talco was signed on April 15," though without details on how Talco would finance the deal.
Tajikistan's Talco aluminum smelter is a key industrial asset in an impoverished and mostly agrarian country of 9 million bordering China. But annual production of the smelter fell 7.2 percent in 2018, and its Soviet-era equipment is in sore need of upgrading.The poorest country to emerge from the wreckage of the Soviet Union in 1991, Tajikistan has looked to soft loans from China's state-owned Export-Import Bank of China to facilitate Beijing's investments in the economy.
It now reportedly owes the bank more than $1.2 billion, equivalent to nearly a fifth of the national GDP. Chinese companies have also acquired rights to a number of mineral concessions in Tajikistan in recent years, some of which were granted to pay for the investment loans. Talco last year launched a mining venture with Chinese company Tibet Huayu Mining Co. Ltd expected to annually produce 1.5tones of gold and 16,000 tones of antimony.
---AFP, Dushanbe
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