An Eye-Opening Geopolitical Struggle Over A Golf Course In Iceland

Thanks to reader Rick for Andrew Higgins' A1 NY Times story on Chinese tycoon and former Communist party Propaganda Department member Huang Nubo, who wants to buy a big slab of Icelandic ice to build a golf resort. Or some a place for the Chinese government to station missiles. Or something in between.

The pitch goes something like this: Local Hero meets A View To A Kill in the vein of any Charlie Chan film.

“It never seemed a very convincing business plan,” said Iceland’s interior minister, Ogmundur Jonasson, who last year rejected a request that Mr. Huang be exempted from Icelandic laws that restrict foreign ownership of land. “I put many questions and got no answers,” the minister added.

Prodded by diplomats from the United States and other countries to take a hard look at Mr. Huang’s intentions, Mr. Jonasson questioned what might lie behind China’s curious interest in Grimsstadir. “One has to look at this from a geopolitical perspective and ask about motivations,” Mr. Jonasson said.

And...

While exotic golf courses are all the rage now, this one seemed to many here a long shot. “I’ve looked at this very closely and gone through all the documents, and I’m just aghast,” said Edward Huijbens, director of the Icelandic Tourism Research Center in Akureyri, the main town in northern Iceland. “The whole project is fundamentally not credible.”

But Mr. Huang’s business strategy has apparently impressed the state-owned China Development Bank, which, according to the Zhongkun Group, last year reached a “cooperation agreement” with the company worth about $800 million. Ms. Xu, Zhongkun’s vice president, said the Chinese bank “will provide loans and financial support to concrete projects by Zhongkun, including, but not exclusively, in Iceland.”