Significant Risk Found in Chinese Links to Argentine Port Infrastructure
Buenos Aires, Argentina, March 26, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- After several failed attempts, the Argentine government in December 2025 relaunched its tender for the 25-year concession to dredge and maintain the Paraná–Paraguay Waterway (Via Navegable Troncal or VNT), the 1000+ mile long river which carries 80% of Argentina’s imports and exports. Its importance for the Argentine economy is equivalent to the importance of the Mississippi River in the United States. The main bidders on the new tendor include DEME Group and Jan De Nul.
Having provided USD 20 billion in emergency financing to Argentina in October 2025, which helped President Milei getting reelected, so far few major investment have materialized. On February 5, 2026 the Reciprocal Trade and Investment Agreement was signed between the USA and Argentina, with its primary focus on agriculture products and critical minerals. Almost all of these are exported/imported through the VNT.
Representing the largest critical infrastructure project under the Milei government for the foreseeable future, America’s economic and national security interests are at stake. US contractors stand to earn USD 4,000,000,000 on the execution of the VNT.
Background on the main bidders for the VNT show a group backed by American investors with operating partner Deme Dredging, the oldest and largest dredging company in the world, and Jan De Nul, the Belgian company that held the concession for since 1995 and has become part of the Argentine system, surviving every regime change since. The owners of the company have, in the past, received a 3-year suspended sentence for bribery of a tax inspector and in 2016 the company was at the center of a major corruption investigation in Ukraine. Various stakeholders in the VNT project expressed serious concerns to the National Port Authority, ANPYN, as reported extensively in the local media, that the VNT tender is tailor-made to assure that only Jan De Nul would win the bid by including various unusual provisions that only Jan De Nul can meet.
The group around Deme Dredging includes US partners such as Great Lakes Dredge and Dock, the oldest and largest US dredger, and Clear Street which counts amongst its investors Calpers, Blackrock, Goldman Sach, and Softbank. It has received a letter of interest from the DFC as well as from the World Bank. While State Owned Companies were disqualified from direct participation in the VNT tender, Jan De Nul offered a backdoor to a China State Owned Enterprise by partnering with Servimagnus S.A. on the VNT. Servimagnus has historically been the partner for Shanghai Dredging, part of one of China’s State-Owned Enterprises CCCC, in Argentina. According to public records, both companies partnered on more than 10 different dredging projects in the last 20 years. Servimagnus is controlled by the influential Román family whose group includes Loginter, a logistic operator for Chinese cargo operations such as COSCO, Goldwind, CRRC,
New discoveries have identified additional networks of commercial linkages connecting the Argentine port logistics company Servimagnus S.A. to a cluster of Chinese entities. The findings underscore strategic risks and security implications for South America’s critical Hidrovía industrial shipping corridor.
The findings, uncovered through corporate relationship mapping and trade data, identify the start of such risk through the connections between two Argentine companies: logistics company Servimagnus S.A. and agrochemical manufacturer Agrofina S.A. The latter has been found to be involve in corporate dealings with Chinese- and Hong Kong-linked firms. Many of these businesses are sanctioned and otherwise flagged for numerous reasons, included forced labor.
Such companies include Shanghai Sunwise Chemical Co. Ltd., Shandong Rainbow Agrosciences Co. Ltd., Qingdao York Logistics Co. Ltd., Ningbo Pangs Chem Co. Ltd., and others spanning key industrial and logistics hubs. Additional linkages connect China-based logistics providers to Jan De Nul-affiliated entities, further embedding Chinese participation within broader infrastructure and dredging ecosystems.
The Hidrovía shipping corridor spans through rivers and tributaries in 6 countries: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay. It is one of the Southern Cone’s most important transportation corridor and a gateway for agricultural exports, energy flows, and maritime access. Any corporate structure that gives Chinese-linked actors proximity to decision-makers, logistics flows, or commercially sensitive contracting around that corridor should be treated as a counterintelligence and strategic-risk issue, not merely as a conventional business matter.
The discovered evidence is strongest for sustained commercial linkage and access. While it does not, by itself, prove direction by the Chinese state or establish illicit conduct, the volume and pattern of China-facing relationships are sufficient to justify heightened scrutiny. They create realistic channels for influence, information collection, leverage, and future state-backed market penetration.
The more serious concern is whether Chinese-linked commercial networks are embedding themselves around a critical waterway through local intermediaries, overlapping directors, and logistics relationships. That kind of foothold can be used over time to shape procurement outcomes, gain visibility into competitors and counterparties, and normalize Chinese participation in infrastructure with strategic consequences far beyond Argentina.
For Argentina, this raises sovereignty and infrastructure-security concerns. For the region, it increases the risk that the Hidrovía becomes another platform through which Beijing can convert commercial access into political and strategic leverage. For the United States, the pattern is relevant because it aligns with a broader PRC playbook: gain influence around ports, logistics, and dual-use infrastructure first through commercial channels, then expand that presence into something far more durable and difficult to reverse.
In practical terms, the business relationships and personnel overlap materially elevates the risk profile. Even absent proof of wrongdoing, a single Argentine intermediary positioned across Servimagnus and a China-linked commercial network presents an obvious vector for access, alignment of interests, and potential influence operations. That is precisely the type of nexus that should trigger enhanced due diligence, beneficial-ownership review, and scrutiny of contacts with Chinese state-owned or state-aligned entities.
It will be interesting to see whether the Argentina government, having benefitted from significant support under the Trump administration, would choose to award the tender to a consortium with extensive links to Chinese State-Owned Enterprises, or to a group backed by major American investors and operators. It will be a test-case for US-Argentina trade and investment relations as advocated by the recently signed Reciprocal Trade and Investment Agreement.
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