(Bloomberg) -- The running of London’s flagship metro line will be switched away from a Hong Kong company to a Japanese consortium.
MTR Corporation Ltd., the current operator of the Elizabeth line, will be replaced by GTS Rail Operations Ltd., Transport for London said in a statement Tuesday.
GTS is a joint venture between Tokyo Metro, Sumitomo and UK transport business Go-Ahead Group Ltd. MTR is majority-owned by the Hong Kong state, where it runs local transport services.
TfL, which is led by London mayor Sadiq Khan, said the new deal will bring “the best parts of Tokyo and London to the Elizabeth line.” The contract, which starts in May, will last for seven years and includes an option to extend for as many as two extra years.
The Elizabeth line was opened in May 2022, stretches from counties to the west and east of London and carries more than 700,000 people per day across the capital.
The UK’s political relationship with China has become more complex since MTR was granted the original contract to operate the line in 2014. At the time, David Cameron’s Conservative government had promised a “golden era” of economic ties between the countries, but Tory skepticism toward Beijing grew in the following years, especially during the Covid pandemic.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer met Chinese President Xi Jinping at the Group of 20 summit in Brazil this week. While the Labour government has stressed the importance to the economy of a good relationship with China, Starmer used the meeting to raise concerns about the treatment of jailed newspaper publisher Jimmy Lai in Hong Kong.
Hong Kong, a former British colony, is a special administrative region of China with its own borders, currency and legal system. China’s imposition of a sweeping national security regime in the wake of mass democracy demonstrations in 2019 fueled concerns in the UK government about an erosion of the “one country, two systems” framework.
--With assistance from Isabel Reynolds, Young-Sam Cho and Katrina Nicholas.
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