Jake's View | InvestHK cooks up the perfect candidate for public relations ceremony

InvestHK, the government agency tasked with attracting foreign investors, has completed 3,000 projects that have brought HK$79 billion to the city since its establishment in 2000.

And that 3,000th one just happened to be ASB Biodiesel, a Middle East-financed company that has built a plant in Tseung Kwan O to collect used cooking oil from restaurants and reprocess it into diesel fuel.

Could you possibly find anything more politically correct? How very fortunate for InvestHK that this one turned up just when it did.

I mean, imagine that No. 3,000 had been a shop selling Italian lingerie. Putting a few licks of paint into rented shop premises in order to sell mainland tourists overpriced European fashion goods also counts as a Hong Kong investment project. But it wouldn't be quite the right flavour for the ceremony, don't you think?

So there must have been a real sigh of relief in InvestHK's Fairmont House offices as the numbers ticked up to 3,000. What would it be? Please, please, let it be something that really looks good. And as luck would have it, No. 3,000 was ASB Biodiesel. Wasn't that just wunnerful?

Of course, we shall forget that ASB Biodiesel has been round for some time and actually started work on that plant in 2009 but stopped construction in 2011 for almost two years amid whinges that the thing wasn't worthwhile if it didn't get government support. Oh well, you know the story.