?
CONFIDENTIAL
approach against fragmented contracts.
For this it was
evidently necessary for one or other of the consortia, or all
of them, to offer a sufficiently firm and favourable price.
There was no chance of agreeing a joint UK/Japanese price in
the time available, even if this was desirable. Given Hong
Kong's evident desire for competition, a joint offer might
indeed, at this stage, increase their nervousness of the
consortium approach. From Hong Kong's point of view, the only
advantage of a joint UK/Japanese bid at this stage might be
that it would save them political or economic difficulty in
choosing between the two. But there was no sign that this
was a present factor in their thinking. We had still had no
opportunity of judging the real strength of the French/German
and Italian offers and the relative advantage of co-operation
with them.
6. We therefore concluded that, while the final judgement
on whether to go for a joint bid must be a commercial one
(and there are some indications apart from Sir A Weinstock's
interest, that the British consortium may not be as confident
of their ability to carry the whole project as they have led us to believe), this was not the right tactical moment to
broach the idea in Hong Kong.
7. The talks on 19 March may have any of the following results:
first the UK consortium bid may emerge as clearly the best and
the multi-contract idea may be dropped.
problem about sharing.
There would then be no
We could farm out parts of the project
/if we
- 3-
CONFIDENTIAL