Over 2,500 people demonstrated Friday evening in Hamburg against the 49.9% sale of Hamburger Hafen und Logistik (HHLA), the city's leading port operator, to Swiss-based Mediterranean Shipping Co. (MSC).
While the protestors marched from HHLA's offices in HafenCity to the town hall while screaming, "Our port - not your casino," flares were thrown and there was a significant police presence.
MSC is submitting a bid to manage HHLA as a joint venture with the city-state of Hamburg, promising to turn the port city in northern Germany into a "central hub" for MSC's international network of container services. This would result in a new office, a doubling of the local workforce, an increase of 1 million teu in MSC traffic, and the relocation of the German cruise company's headquarters to Hamburg.
Some of the city's biggest businessmen, like Klaus-Michael Kühne, the 86-year-old who runs Kuehne + Nagel and owns a 30% stake in Hamburg's top line, Hapag-Lloyd, have also expressed strong opposition to MSC's entry.
Hapag-Lloyd has cautioned that MSC's proposal could cause it to cut its transport to Central Europe via Hamburg to roughly 70 or 80% of current volumes.
The explosive show on Tuesday coincided with the discovery of a 453 kg Second World War bomb of British design during dredging operations at the port. It was immediately defused, according to a post on Twitter by the Hamburg fire department late yesterday evening.
-By Anja iidiko |thetranspoteronline24|Germany
