Cha ca thang long

The design of Long Thành International Airport in Đồng Nai Province. — Photo courtesy of ACV

HÀ NỘI — The State-run Airports Corporation of Việt Nam (ACV) has said it wants to borrow US dollars from local banks for the country’s largest airport project, Long Thành International Airport in Đồng Nai Province.

ACV’s chairman, Lại Xuân Thanh, sent a report to the Economic Committee of the National Assembly, asking them to support the plan of borrowing and paying in US dollars in order to maximise benefits and efficiency.

Thanh said as the interest rate in the foreign currency was lower than the Vietnamese đồng , it would help the firm to save on costs.

According to ACV’s leader, phase one of the investment project, estimated to cost about US$2.5 billion, was being focused on, but the COVID-19 pandemic had a great impact on economies around the world and in particular the aviation industry.

As all international commercial flights were stopped in Việt Nam, it affected ACV’s main source of foreign currency revenue, while the outbreaks in some localities also significantly reduced domestic passenger volume.

Thanh also said the pandemic has made it difficult to negotiate and sign contracts with partner companies as foreign experts had to undergo quarantine.

Moreover, the ACV representative said, the soaring price of raw materials, especially steel prices, was causing difficulties for the project’s implementation.

To deal with all the factors, ACV proposed to the Prime Minister to allow it to accumulate money from production and business activities for investment.

The firm also proposed the PM consider and approve the plan to allow ACV to borrow from domestic state-owned banks in USD and pay in USD to save on interest.

ACV’s representative said: “The lending interest rate in USD is always significantly lower than that in VND, while ACV has direct and indirect USD revenue from business activities in international airports such as NộI Bài, Tân Sơn Nhất and Phú Quốc to pay interest on foreign currency loans.”

Thanh said: “At present, domestic state-owned banks that have a surplus of USD need to find reliable lending partners and bring higher interest rates than deposit rates at foreign banks,” adding such a lending option could ensure benefits for the State and improve project efficiency while preserving and developing state capital in ACV as a state-owned enterprise.

Also to ensure the progress of Long Thành Airport project in the context of the pandemic, ACV suggested the National Assembly direct the relevant authorities to soon apply measures to stabilise the price of materials as well as support the plan of borrowing and paying in USD to ensure maximum efficiency.

In April this year, ACV, which is the investor of the expensive and ambitious transport hub project in the southern province of Đồng Nai, committed to start construction of Long Thành International Airport’s passenger terminal early next year.

As Long Thành International Airport is one of the breakthrough projects of the national transport sector in the 2021-25 period, deputy transport minister Lê Anh Tuấn urged all parties to coordinate and facilitate the progress of all components of the project and disburse the allocated State capital.

According to ACV, Long Thành International Airport will be built in three phases over three decades. In the first phase, one runway with a length of 4,000m, taxiways, an apron, and a passenger terminal with other auxiliary works sprawling 373,000sq.m will be built to serve 25 million passengers and 1.2 million tonnes of cargo each year.

The airport, which was expected to cost VNĐ336.63 trillion ($14.5 billion), is designed to have four runways, four passenger terminals, and other auxiliary facilities to ensure a capacity of 100 million passengers and 5 million tonnes of cargo a year by 2040. — VNS

The hamlet, located in An Giang Province’s An Phu District, has got an unsurprising nickname: the “Twins Hamlet.”

Pham Ngoc Liep, who has two twin grandchildren in the hamlet, said: “Almost every household here has a pair of twins. Come to think of it, it’s a bit unusual.”

The hamlet has 17 pairs of twins who have rhyming names, including a pair called An Phu and An Giang, named after the district and province, and another called Lu and Lut ( lu lut means heavy flood in Vietnamese) since the twins were born during a historical flood that struck the region in 2000.

Kim Ly and Kim Yen are named after two big gold shops in the Chau Doc Town in the hope that the two girls will grow up and own gold shops one day.

The first twins are 80 years old – Bay Nghi and her younger brother Tam Nghia; and the youngest twins, Ngoc Nhu and Ngoc Y, are 8 years old. The remaining twins include those in the 40s and those born between 2000 and 2013.

Loi Pham and Loc Pham, sons of Cao Thi Diem and Pham No Han, play games with each other. Photo by VnExpress/Ngoc Tai.

Cao Thi Diem, 39-year-old mother of 9-year-old twin boys, said that she and her husband had no plans to have many children since they are laborers and often struggle to make ends meet. After having a boy and a girl, they wanted another daughter and then stop having kids.

“I got pregnant again when my second child was only 10 months old. So I asked him whether to keep the baby or not. He said I should keep the child, adding that we should be responsible for making the baby,” she said.

She could not afford an ultrasound, but an accident, when she was hit by a car, turned out to be a blessing in disguise. The person responsible for the accident paid for an ultrasound and she learned that she was pregnant with twins. She gave birth to two beautiful boys.

Even though she had to raise four small children, Diem did not take any “maternal leave” and kept working while her husband Pham No Han worked as a hired laborer from dawn to dusk everyday without a break.

But the couple broke their “plan” and went on to have another daughter and are now raising five children.

The lily connection

“No one can explain why this stretch of road has many twins. Locals assume that this phenomenon was caused by eating water lilies harvested from a nearby lake. About 10 years ago, the lake was drained and converted into farming land. After that, the hamlet stopped recording twins,” Diem said.

Some locals also believe that having twins is determined by genetics. No Han, for instance, has younger twin brothers – Phan Van Chien and Phan Van Thang. They are 32 years old now. After getting married in 2008, Chien’s wife gave birth to two identical girls, before Han and his wife had their pair.

However, most of the remaining families with twins are not related, so the genetics argument was not widely accepted. It also appears that no social or biological scientist has studied the unusual phenomenon.

While the hamlet’s residents do not have a solid explanation, the families with twins are happy to have them.

Ta Thi Thu Thuy, 43, mother of three daughters including a pair of twins, continues to cuddle, hug and kisses all of them. “It took a lot of hard work for me to raise them this big,” she said. Sometimes, looking from behind at the twins, Thuy often gets their names mixed.

Furthermore, instead of feeling the burden of having to nurture and educate three children, the couple are so pleased that they are growing up into hard working and bright students that they are eager to have even more children.

Twin sisters Kim Ngan and Kim Ha study at home. Photo by VnExpress/Ngoc Tai.

“I will have more kids if I know for sure that I will have another pair of twins. Since that is not certain, we decided to stop,” said another father of two twin sisters, smiling.

After hearing of the hamlet with many twins, people from other localities have flocked to the place to “learn the experience.”

Catch the man

While mothers having twins just laugh and say, “It’s God’s blessing,” some of the husbands humorously assert it is their doing.

Since most of the married women here are from another commune, “If you want to have twins, get married to men in this hamlet”, joked the father of a pair of twins.

Ha Thi Huyen Giao, a doctor at Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Tam Tri Dong Thap General Hospital, said the rate of having twins in the world is currently about 1-1.5 percent, double that of 40 years ago.

In the past, Vietnam had a lower rate of twins than the world, but now it is not much different due to people having access to and success in infertility treatment.

The cause of have so many natural twins in the hamlet has not been identified by researchers, but having twins depends on factors such as age of pregnant woman, number of births given and other factors. For instance, some factors such as skin color, ethnicity and living environment have been reported to increase the likelihood of twins, but this is not a common occurrence.

According to the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM), the chance of having twins via genetics from the maternal side is 1.66 percent, while the figure for men is only 0.8 percent.

Twins can be inherited by skipping a generation, with grandparents have twins, parents having normal births and their offspring having twins.

Le Thi Bich Thuy, chairwoman of Phuoc Hung Commune People’s Committee, said that all 17 cases of twins in Phuoc Khanh Hamlet were born to women who became pregnant naturally.

She said no one knows until now why the hamlet has so many twins. “The senior citizens here all say they didn’t follow any special diet or pray for twins.”

Vietnam is rolling out policies to improve FDI mobilisation

After the meeting with the task force for foreign direct investment (FDI) attraction in late-May, last week, Deputy Prime Minister Pham Binh Minh, head of the task force, urged all ministries and agencies to provide more general advice and policies to lure in more investors and strengthen investment promotion activities.

Of these, the Ministry of Planning and Investment (MPI) is the focal agency in the building of Vietnam’s FDI mobilisation strategy by 2030 to be submitted to the prime minister this month. The ministry will also be forwarded all reports and recommendations related to enterprises’ difficulties and challenges sent to relevant authorities.

Based on initial feedback, tax and related issues remain a headache for investors. The deputy PM asked the Ministry of Finance to provide measures as soon as possible to remove challenges related to withholding tax (especially foreign contractor withholding tax), the conflicts of legal provisions on taxes as well as export, and import tariffs.

Meanwhile, DPM Minh asked the Ministry of Industry and Trade and relevant ministries to consider off-shore wind power projects and consider adding a new form of energy (hydrogen) to the master plan.

The Ministry of Labours, Invalids, and Social Affairs will have to make more efforts to urgently resolve all issues related to granting and extending work permits for experts working for foreign-invested enterprises; as well as accelerate the training of workers to meet the needs of large corporations for skilled, technical, and management workers in line with Industry 4.0 trends.

The efforts of the task force and the local governments have proven effective so far. A few weeks ago, Binh Duong People’s Committee handed over investment certificates to five foreign-invested companies valued at $1 billion in the midst of the fourth COVID-19 outbreak in Vietnam.

Of these, Polytex Far Eastern Vietnam (from Taiwan) had the largest capitalisation with a total investment of $600 million, followed by Cheng Loong (also from Taiwan) pouring an additional $100 million into its $1 billion local project, and Singapore’s New Motion Industrial Co., Ltd. registered a new $184 million project. This has pulled Binh Duong to the fourth position among 56 cities and provinces receiving FDI in the first five months of 2021, with the total investment of $1.1 billion.

Meanwhile, the task force has also boosted cooperation with numerous new billion-dollar projects in the first months, clinching deals like the LNG power plant in Long An and O Mon II thermal power plant in Can Tho, while encouraging others to expand.

Regent Garment Factory Ltd., a subsidiary of Crystal International Group Ltd., was approved in May to build another factory in Hai Duong with the value of $35 million. This is the fourth factory of the company which has so far registered the total investment of around $227 million in the country.

The total investment in the first five months saw a slight increase on-year to nearly $14 billion. Moreover, the average scale of newly- and additionally-registered projects has risen significantly since last year, from $2.2 million to $14.4 million, and from $7.9 million to $11.3 million per project this year.

By Nguyen Huong

Deputy Director of the provincial Department of Information and Communications and member of the provincial Steering Committee on COVID-19 Prevention and Control Vu Huy Phuong said on June 12 that Tu Son town will be under social distancing in line with the Prime Minister’s Decree No.19/CT-TTg instead of Decree No.15/CT-TTg. Tieu Son street alone in Tuong Giang ward will continue to be under stricter social distancing in line with Decree No. 16/CT-TTg.

Communes of Yen Gia, Que Tan, Phu Lang, Chi Lang, Dao Vien and Viet Hung in Que Vo district as well as 33 villages in eight communes of Thuan Thanh district will shift from the application of social distancing measures under Decree No.16 to those under Decree No. 15.

On June 8, the northern province of Quang Ninh also allowed several business sectors to resume operations, including stimulating local tourism demand in line with pandemic prevention and control regulations.

Director of Sun World Ha Long Tran Van Minh said ticket price will be halved to attract more visitors.

Those coming from pandemic-hit areas must submit certifications proving they are negative for SARS-CoV-2 within 5-7 days.

VNA