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Angry Birds mogul aims to tunnel through Baltic anti-China sentiment
- Peter Vesterbacka hopes to build a tunnel to establish a rail link between Finland and Estonia, backed by Chinese money
- But the Finnish entrepreneur must overcome Baltic nations’ growing differences with Beijing
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He is the developer of Angry Birds, a game that was downloaded more than 4 billion times, became a feature-length animated movie and broke new ground for mobile gaming more than a decade ago.
Now, Peter Vesterbacka is hoping to break ground of an entirely different sort. Armed with US$17 billion in Chinese money, the Finnish entrepreneur wants to build a tunnel from Finland to Estonia, in what would be one of modern Europe’s major infrastructure projects.
Talking from his office in Helsinki, Finland’s capital, the gaming mogul describes the inspiration he has drawn from Japan’s Shinkansen bullet trains and China’s high-speed rail network.
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It is natural, he tells the South China Morning Post, for his project to partner with China Railway Group and to take financing from Touchstone Capital Partners for the 100km (62-mile) project. “I think it’s pretty obvious where you should look for the technology if you want to be able to do fast rail,” he said.
01:49
China’s freight trains to Europe hit all-time high amid coronavirus crisis in 2020
China’s freight trains to Europe hit all-time high amid coronavirus crisis in 2020
Linking Helsinki and Estonia’s capital Tallinn, separated by the Gulf of Finland, has long been discussed by the countries’ governments. The tunnel would cut the journey to 20 minutes, compared with two hours by ferry.
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