TNAG-0422-FCO40-468-Construction-of-an-underground-railway-system-in-Hong-Kong-1973 — Page 37

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Hong Kong and Indian Ocean Department

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Mr Logan

Sir Duncan Watson

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Mr Crop

Goodfellow

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PA

MRTS

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1.

Lord Nelson of Stafford who is shortly going to China for the British Industrial Trade Exhibition called to see me on 7 March. At the end of our discussion on China he asked if I also handled the questions of Hong Kong and having discovered that I did he spoke about the Consortium bid for the MTS. His firm is of course one of the principal members of the Consortium. He said that members of the Consortium were already receiving low key approaches from nationals of other countries (he did not specify which) suggesting that the contract was too big for any one consortium to handle and should there not be some getting together. He asked what I thought about this. I said that so far as we knew the British Consortium were standing high in the order of merit at present and I thought it might be wrong to show any lack of confidence by responding to overtures from others more particularly as the recent overtures may well be that they recognise the strong position in which the Consortium stands. As I saw it the problem which faced the Hong Kong Government at present was to decide whether to proceed via a single consortium or an amalgam of consortiums or alternatively to go for a multi- contract system. It seemed to me that the latter might not be advantageous to British interest and that in any further dealings with the Hong Kong Government the Consortium would be well advised to arm themselves with arguments why to proceed by the multi-contract system might not only be less efficient but also more expensive to the Hong Kong Government and likely to produce delays.

2. Finally I said to Lord Nelson that I hoped that he would use his influence in the Consortium to ensure that whoever was sent to the next meetings in Hong Kong was of the highest possible calibre. It might be felt that the next meeting was not going to be decisive and that a second grade man could be sent. I thought that this would be a great mistake. Lord Nelson thanked me for what I had said and agreed that it was most important that a really good man should attend the meetings in Hong Kong. He also said that personally he thought the multi-contract system would be disadvantageous to Hong Kong. He would try to ensure that whoever went to the meeting in Hong Kong was possessed of chapter and verse of the disadvantages of it.

M

8 March 1973

K M Wilford

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