TNAG-0422-FCO40-468-Construction-of-an-underground-railway-system-in-Hong-Kong-1973 — Page 59

?

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