Canadian Minister of Finance Chrystia Freeland said Ottawa was suspending activity with a Chinese-founded development bank while it investigates complaints by a Canadian who resigned from the lender that it is dominated by “[Chinese] Communist Party hacks” and his country should not be a member.
The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) on Wednesday confirmed in an e-mail that Bob Pickard resigned as its director-general of global communications, and rejected his criticism as unfounded.
The AIIB, seen by some as a Chinese rival to the World Bank and Asian Development Bank, was founded in 2016 to finance railways and other infrastructure. It has 106 member governments including most Asian countries and Australia, Canada, Russia, France and the UK. Japan and the US are not members.
Photo: Reuters
“The government of Canada will immediately halt all government-led activity at the bank,” Freeland, who is also deputy prime minister, told reporters in Ottawa. “I have instructed the [Canadian] Department of Finance to lead an immediate review of the allegations raised and of Canada’s involvement in the AIIB.”
“As the world’s democracies work to de-risk our economies by limiting our strategic vulnerabilities to authoritarian regimes, we must likewise be clear about the means through which these regimes exercise their influence around the world,” Freeland said.
Pickard, who worked in communications for AIIB for 15 months, said on Twitter that resigning was his only course as a “patriotic Canadian.”
He said the bank was dominated by “Communist Party hacks” who were “like an in-house KGB or Gestapo or Stasi” — the secret police of the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany and communist-era East Germany respectively.
The Beijing-headquartered bank “has one of the most toxic cultures imaginable,” Pickard wrote. “I don’t believe that my country’s interests are served by its AIIB membership.”
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