Contract of Lahore airport expansion awarded to Chinese company

The Pakistani government has awarded a contract worth nearly $382 million to a Chinese company to reconstruct Lahore's Allama Iqbal International Airport, the Chinese state-owned People's Daily newspaper reported Tuesday.

China Construction Third Engineering Bureau won the 2.6 billion RMB contract to engineer, procure, and construct the reimagined Lahore airport, which will become Pakistan's largest after the reconstruction is completed, the report claimed.

"It is the largest project that the Third Engineering Bureau has undertaken overseas, marking another important achievement in Belt and Road construction," the newspaper, which is a Chinese Communist Party mouthpiece, said in its report.

Prior to this, the same Chinese company was awarded a number of major projects in Pakistan including the Karachi-Lahore Expressway between Sukkur and Multan, Lahore's Arfa Software Technology Park, and The Centaurus Hotel.

Chinese President Xi Jinping has championed what China formally calls the “One Belt, One Road” or OBOR initiative to build a new Silk Road linking Asia, Africa and Europe, a landmark programme to invest billions of dollars in infrastructure projects including railways, ports and power grids.

The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) is the flagship programme of OBOR. The construction of an international airport in Gwadar is also part of CPEC.