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The lessons China learned from Enron

Article in the Financial Times about how local governments in China are making ends meet:

Step 1:  local government announces that a parcel of land is available for sale.

Step 2:  Local government sets up a private government-owned land-owning company on which it guarantees the debts and provides limited capital -- effectively a captive finance company backed by loans from the large Chinese banks

Step 3:  Auction off the land for development.  The local government already owns the land!

Step 4:  The company that the local government set up borrows 100% of the cost of buying the land from the local government.  

Step 5:  Local government pockets the proceeds from the sale of the land, and uses part of the proceeds as "normal income" and the rest of the sales proceeds to meet interest and principal repayment.

Step 6:  Hope no one notices

Step 7:  Once they notice, set up a better hidden New Land owning company, buy the land from the first buyer (which is you) at a much higher price and restart the process.

The story is that we are now on Step #10 of this merry-go-round.  The biggest culprits are the managers of the phantom cities... ever-rising land prices for land that one wants, that no one will develop.  

A Ponzi scheme just like Enron was all these years ago!

The impact is interesting because it means that the central government is only now becoming aware of the scope of the problem, which is the exposure that the main banks have to local governments.  Like Enron, no one noticed because no one talked (just like Enron), and stats were not compiled until the problem is so large that it can no longer be ignored --- that's when it ends up in the Financial Times of London.

As an aside, Enron used strong NDA language to ensure that bankers would not talk to each other about their Enron deals...everyone was shocked when they discovered that they were ALL being played by Enron.  When Enron went bankrupt (I was not involved) some colleague bankers were shocked by the number of transactions Enron had made (it was a carbon copy of what the Chinese are doing now).  I remember one instance, where Enron had bought a power plant, when it unraveled the initial price was $150 million, by the end of the game three years later an affiliate of Enron had purchased the powerplant for nearly $ 1 billion...the difference between the two figures was deal expenses, interest expenses, refinancing expenses, and plain theft, I cannot recall exactly (it was years ago, I was not in the deal team and was not even on the same continent) but I seem to remember that Enron's executives walked away would about $400 million.


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