Sars forces closure of Motorola office in Beijing
Message 18776062
COMMENTS: Today Siemens will be saying they want to help China even more than they already did.
"Siemens Donates Medical Equipment and Mobile Phones Valued at 7 million RMB to Help China Fight SARS"
siemens.com;
Guess who'll get the future business!!
China
Sars forces closure of Motorola office in Beijing
By James Kynge in Beijing and Joe Leahy in Hong Kong
Published: May 5 2003 22:19 | Last Updated: May 6 2003 12:12
Motorola, one of the largest foreign investors in China, closed its headquarters in Beijing as the number of new cases continued to rise in the Chinese capital
Gro Harlem Brundtland, director general of the World Health Organisation, on Tuesday said it was too early to say whether the Sars outbreak was receeding worldwide.
Speaking ahead of an emergency meeting of EU health ministers in Brussels, she said the outbreak was over in Vietnam and on its way down in Canada.
But she said: "We can't say with any certainty today whether the total picture of the outbreak has peaked or not.
"Certainly, we have not seen a peak in China yet. We still have a considerable size of outbreak in Hong Kong."
Beijing, the worst-hit city in the world, has been hit by more than 1,800 cases of severe acute respiratory syndrome - nearly half China's total - and 103 deaths. The number of new cases being reported daily indicates that, despite nearly 16,000 people quarantined and recent official claims that the illness has "reached a plateau", the disease remains virulent in the city.
Motorola, the US mobile phone producer, said it closed its main office in Beijing after a staff member was discovered to have caught the virus. The case is the third time Motorola has had to deal with a suspected or confirmed infection at one of its Asian installations.
While there are few signs yet that Sars is scaring investors away from China, the rising number of cases has disrupted corporate operations and deterred foreign businessmen from visiting the country.
The disease has killed at least 206 people on China's mainland and made more than 4,200 sick, causing widespread economic damage. Schools in the capital are closed, some shops and entertainment venues shuttered and many offices are working with depleted staff levels.
The level of government anxiety was further revealed on Monday by a report in the Beijing Youth Daily that authorities have isolated 80 reservoirs around the capital in order to protect the purity of drinking water. The measures will prevent vehicles and people from getting close to the water source, said the newspaper.
In the central coastal province of Zhejiang, about 1,000 villagers surrounded a local government office to protest against the quarantine of suspected Sars patients near their homes.
The villagers smashed and overturned police and government cars, and demanded that the patients be moved.
Zhejiang, near Shanghai, has so far reported few cases of Sars but authorities are anxious to stop the virus from reaching China's largest city and its commercial centre.
Joseph Yam, head of the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, the territory's de facto central bank, on Monday suggested that the government could issue bonds to help pay for the battle against Sars rather than use the territory's fiscal reserves.
"It may be a good idea actually to have this particular requirement funded by an issue of bonds if there is concern that too much reserves are being committed to fund this expenditure," Mr Yam said, describing Sars relief as a "one-off" expense.
The comments are likely to add to the debate over how to finance Hong Kong's growing fiscal deficit, which stood at HK$61.5bn ($7.9bn, €7bn, £4.9bn) or about 5 per cent of gross domestic product last year.
Analysts expect the deficit to be higher again this year because of Sars, with the government already allocating an additional HK$11.8bn in aid money.
Concern over the deficit has fuelled speculation over the sustainability of Hong Kong's pegged exchange rate, under which the territory's currency is fixed at HK$7.8 using a currency board system.
However, Hong Kong has almost no public debt and the territory still has more than HK$300bn in fiscal reserves on top of the foreign exchange reserves that underpin the peg.
Some bankers argue that the Hong Kong government should issue bonds if only to serve as a benchmark for the corporate market. But this would have to be weighed against investor sentiment on the peg. |
