France hopes to expand cooperation with Hong Kong by attending international bidding of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) government's projects and launching other bilateral cooperative projects.

Consul General of France in Hong Kong Serge Mostura made the remarks at the Seminar on Public Private Partnership (PPP) held here Monday. The one-day seminar focuses on discussions of French-Hong Kong PPP cooperation in transport, civil works, water and waste treatment.

French companies are interested in cooperation in the technical,legal and communications fields, he noted.

Mostura said France has a long history of public and private partnership in building large infrastructure and other projects. The private sector can join the government's modernization by taping the market capital and transferring advanced technology.

He said he believed that there is great prospect for strengthening French-HK public and private partnership.

Sarah Liao Sau-tung, Hong Kong secretary for the environment, transport and works, said at the seminar that Hong Kong wants to draw international experience in its modernization drive and speedup the drive by using less financial outlay.

She said a number of upcoming government infrastructure projects need foreign participation.

Lui Ping-hong, principal environment protection officer of the Hong Kong Environment Protection Department, told Xinhua that HongKong has three garbage disposal plants and that all of them are French-HK jointly-run ventures.

Though no cooperation projects of the kind are at hand, Hong Kong's environmental protection projects may need other foreign partners in the near future, he said. So he came to the seminar tohave a better knowledge of French companies.

By the end of January this year, over 470 French companies had established their business in Hong Kong and over 10 percent of them had benefited from the implementation of the Chinese mainland/Hong Kong Closer Economic Partnership Arrangement, according to sources from the French Chamber of Commerce and Industry in Hong Kong.

Source: Xinhua