Reading the tea leaves in Panama has always been difficult, but at his weekly press conference yesterday, Panama president Jose Raul Mulino indicated that the country could look to form a partnership with private interests to take over Hutchison’s Panama Ports Company (PPC), the entity that has found itself at the centre of China-US geopolitical rivalries.

According to our friends at gCaptain, the country’s comptroller general, which recently conducted an audit of the 25-year contract between PPC and Panama, has concluded that the agreement was “unconstitutional”.

The sale of PPC to the MSC-BlackRock consortium, although carved out of the proposed deal to sell the entire international Hutchison port portfolio, has been the major sticking point, and led Chinese authorities to censure Hutchison’s other business interests in China.

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