Hutchison Whampoa, which has struggled for 10 years to gain a foothold in India's ports sector, has suffered another rebuff.
Li Ka-shing's otherwise hugely successful ports division, Hutchison Port Holdings, was shut out of projects in Mumbai and Chennai by India's Ministry of Defence ostensibly for 'security' reasons.
The chairmen of the port trusts in those cities, where project tenders had been put on hold pending security evaluations, received confidential notes saying Hutchison and at least two other Chinese firms had failed to qualify, the Times of India reported on Wednesday.
A spokesman for the Mumbai Port Trust confirmed the content of those letters yesterday. Official sources at Hutchison in Hong Kong prefer to say that the company has never been prevented from bidding for a port project in India. Rather, they say it has never found a project that met its 'investment criteria'.
This belies an internal memo sent out three days ago by the firm's group communications office which, according to a Hutchison executive based in southern China, said the ports unit had failed to enter India again.
Other private firms have come to realise that partnering Mr Li's firm to bid for any terminal project in the world's biggest democracy is the kiss of death.