TNAG-2247-FCO40-3230-Business-interests-in-Hong-Kong-Cable-&-Wireless-1991 — Page 221

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26 February 1991

The

should be broken or whether it should remain intact. consultants are BAH (Booze Allen Hamilton). I have had no direct contact with them, but Cable and Wireless tell me that they were originally a British firm who were bought out some years ago by American interests. They are currently working on this project with a three-person team, one American, one from Singapore, and one, Janice Hughes, from the UK. It must seem likely that they will recommend an end to Cable and Wireless' monopoly. Certainly this is what Cable and Wireless fear. If we can get alongside these consultants to find out. more about their deliberations then I will let you konw.

4. I appreciate the difficulties of any direct UK intervention on this, particularly in light of the recent ending of British Telecom's telephone monopoly in the UK. Nevertheless this is a very major dimension to the British commercial presence in Hong Kong which is clearly coming under sustained attack from competition from the US, a country which already supplies four times as many of Hong Kong's imports as the UK, and it is a situation therefore which I believe warrants attention at an appropriately high level in the DTI and FCO.

Yours ever, Pelú

P W Heap

Copies: R S Reeve Esq

Head of COMED

FCO

D Love Esq OT2/2 DTI

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