CK Hutchison sues over Panama

CK Hutchison’s Panama unit has opened a second legal war over the Panama Canal ports, this time in London against Danish shipping giant A.P. Moller-Maersk, after Panama took control of the Balboa and Cristobal terminals in February 2026. The arbitration is separate from Hutchison’s damages claim against the Panamanian state. (reuters.com) The accusation is blunt: Panama Ports Company says Maersk worked with Panamanian officials to push it out and replace it at Balboa with APM Terminals, Maersk’s ports arm. Panama Ports Company says the alleged plan started before Panama’s Supreme Court ruling was even published. (reuters.com, container-mag.com) These are not ordinary docks. Balboa sits on the Pacific entrance of the Panama Canal, and Cristobal sits on the Atlantic entrance, so together they touch traffic moving between two oceans on one of the world’s busiest trade shortcuts. (ckh.com.hk, reuters.com) Hutchison had run those terminals through Panama Ports Company since 1997. In 2021, Panama extended the concession for another 25 years, but Panama’s Supreme Court later ruled that the legal framework behind both the original concession and the extension was unconstitutional. (ticotimes.net, seatrade-maritime.com) After the ruling was published in the official gazette on February 23, 2026, Panama moved in immediately and occupied both terminals. Reports at the time said APM Terminals was brought in to temporarily manage Balboa during the transition. (maritime-executive.com, seatrade-maritime.com) That would already be a major port dispute on its own, but these same assets were also part of Hutchison’s much bigger ports sale announced on March 4, 2025. In that deal, a BlackRock-led group agreed in principle to buy Hutchison’s 90 percent stake in Panama Ports Company and an 80 percent controlling interest in 43 ports with 199 berths across 23 countries. (ckh.com.hk) The price attached to that global sale was about $22.8 billion in enterprise value, which is why every twist in Panama now spills into boardrooms far outside Panama. A buyer does not want to discover that the front door asset in the package is already in court, under state control, or both. (cnbc.com, reuters.com) The politics around the sale were combustible long before this week’s filing. Reuters reported in July 2025 that CK Hutchison was trying to add a “major strategic investor” from China to the BlackRock-led buyer group, after reports that state-owned China Cosco Shipping wanted in. (reuters.com) That move made sense because the original sale had drawn pressure from both Washington and Beijing. Reuters said the March 2025 announcement came after criticism over Chinese influence around the canal, while later reporting said adding China Cosco Shipping could ease Beijing’s objections but raise fresh concerns in the United States. (reuters.com, reuters.com) By January 2026, Bloomberg reported Hutchison was even considering splitting the port package into separate parcels with different ownership structures, including a setup that could give China Cosco Shipping larger stakes in regions friendlier to Beijing. When a deal starts needing different maps for different capitals, it stops being a normal infrastructure sale. (bloomberg.com) Now the London arbitration adds one more layer: Hutchison is no longer fighting only a host government over a concession. It is also accusing one of the world’s biggest shipping groups of helping engineer who gets to run a canal gateway, which is the kind of claim that can delay a sale even when the number on the contract still says $19 billion to $23 billion. (bloomberg.com, reuters.com)