A cargo aircraft of the Russian airline Aeroflot is parked at the Frankfurt-Hahn airport in Lautzenhausen, Germany. File photo: CFP
A bid by an obscure Chinese logistics and construction company for Frankfurt-Hahn Airport in Germany was halted by German regional officials on Thursday due to "doubts over the reliability of the purchaser," Economy Minister Volker Wissing of the airport's current owner, Rhineland-Palatinate state, said in a statement.
The state government has postponed the Hahn airport's sale and is now looking at other two potential Chinese bidders - HNA Group and Henan Civil Aviation Development & Investment Co - domestic news portal 21cn.com reported on Thursday, citing Germany's Deutsche Welle.
Early in June, the Rhineland-Palatinate government announced that it had signed an agreement with Shanghai Yiqian Trading Co for the sale of an 82.5 percent stake in the facility for an amount in the "low double digits" in millions of euros, media reports said, citing Deutsche Welle.
However, as the agreement awaited the approval of the German state's parliament, the state government itself started to question the investor's credibility, as Yiqian is barely known even in China.
The information on the State Administration for Industry and Commerce (SAIC) website shows that Yiqian was established in 2013, with registered capital of 50 million yuan ($7.53 million).
The company's main shareholders include Kan Wang, whose name sounds like Kyle Wang, the representative of Yiqian identified in German media reports. The executive director is named Yu Tao Chou, and he was also the spokesman for Yiqian during the acquisition process.
The company's business line is quite broad, ranging from architecture to electronics and telecommunication products, furniture and construction to even investment and management consulting, the information showed.
But the company's office is hardly in line with that kind of a business empire.
A Global Times reporter paid a visit to the company's base in Shanghai at the address registered in the SAIC's website on Thursday. The office was on the 17th floor of an old building. There was no company logo or other identifying material. The space itself was a simple loft-style two-story unit with an area of around 40 to 50 square meters.
No one was working on the second floor. Three people present on the first floor were evasive about whether they were Yiqian's employees. Some of them said they work for a logistics company and didn't know the business upstairs.
None of them had heard about Yiqian's takeover of the Hahn airport.
"Yiqian's leaders are on a business trip, and I will forward your questions as soon as they come back," one of them said.
The Global Times also tried to call the contact number registered on the SAIC's website. A woman who identified herself as an employee of a logistics company answered.
"Yiqian did rent an office here, but our company has nothing to do with it," she told the Global Times, "No employee of Yiqian works here. Its leaders sometimes visit the office, probably several times a month."
There's nothing to link the modest office to an enterprise that has the capacity to acquire an airport.
Zhang Qihuai, a civil aviation expert and law professor at China University of Political Science and Law, said that the German state government might have been in a rush to clinch the deal due to fiscal considerations, but it should probably have done more investigation beforehand.
In recent years, the Yahn airport has struggled with falling revenues and decreasing passenger numbers.
According to media reports, the airport lost 16 million euros ($17.78 million) in 2015. Passenger numbers plunged to 2.7 million in 2015 from about 4 million 10 years earlier.