Sri Lanka announced on Friday that it had rented out an expensive international airport, which was built using loans from China, to a foreign partnership. This move comes as the country's government, which is struggling with money problems, tries to get rid of properties that are costing it too much.
This airport, located near a wildlife area on the south coast, opened in 2013 but immediately ran into problems. Since then, it has been causing financial troubles for the government.
A spokesperson for the government said that they had agreed to lease the airport to a partnership between a company from India called Shaurya Aeronautics and a company from Russia called Airports of Regions Management Company. There were only four other companies interested in taking over the airport, which doesn't have any regular flights right now.
The airport is named after a former president, Mahinda Rajapaksa, who borrowed a lot of money from China to build projects like this airport, but they didn't turn out to be profitable.
After getting help from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) last year, Sri Lanka has been trying to sell off state-owned properties that are losing money.
This airport is in an area where birds migrate, and sometimes planes have had to land because they hit birds while flying.
Once, the military had to send hundreds of soldiers to get animals like deer, buffalo, and elephants off the runway so that planes could take off and land.
The first foreign airline to use this airport was Air Arabia in 2013, but they stopped after just six weeks. Another airline, Flydubai, also stopped using the airport in 2018, possibly because not enough people were using it.
Sri Lankan Airlines, the country's national airline, also stopped flying to this airport in 2015. They said they saved $18 million every year by not flying there.
One reason Sri Lanka is in financial trouble is because it owes a lot of money to China. In 2017, the country couldn't pay back a big loan from China, so they let a Chinese company take over a nearby port for 99 years. This made some people worried that China was using its money to control other countries.
BOB Post
