"ON OCTOBER 30, 2018, Mottama Holdings invited journalists to a high-profile “topping-out” ceremony for its M Tower project, a 26-storey office building near Hledan junction in Yangon that used prefabricated steel structure from the company’s factory in the city. After putting in place the final steel beam – complete with gold-coloured bolts – more than 100 metres above Pyay Road, company chair U Yang Ho hailed a “new era” for Myanmar’s construction industry, one in which steel would replace reinforced concrete as the building material of choice for high-rise projects. M Tower, he added, “will become a prominent landmark in Yangon”. Behind the scenes, though, there was less rosy news. Twelve days earlier, one of Mottama’s key partners, Chinese firm Sino Great Wall, had received notice from regulators in China that it was under investigation for suspected violations of information disclosure rules. Sino Great Wall won the US$80 million engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) contract for M Tower in January 2016, shortly before its share price peaked at 14.4 yuan, giving it a market capitalisation of 23 billion yuan ($3.4 billion). At the time, Sino Great Wall was winning billions of dollars of foreign EPC contracts and billing itself as a “leading private enterprise along the Belt and Road” – a reference to President Xi Jinping’s signature trade and investment initiative launched in 2013. Today Sino Great Wall’s share price is just 2.29 yuan. The company’s debt-to-net-asset ratio is more than 120 percent, and it is facing litigation from nearly a dozen creditors due to 2.7 billion yuan of overdue loans. Rather than a poster-child for BRI, Sino Great Wall has become a cautionary tale of debt-fuelled overexpansion. Since the company’s financial problems came to light in the second half of 2018, Sino Great Wall has been forced to scale back its international ambitions considerably. It is unclear whether this has affected M Tower, which is due for completion in 2020. A crane atop the building’s steel frame sat idle earlier this month and there were few workers at the site, but Mottama did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Sino Great Wall’s Yangon office – just 100 metres from M Tower – was locked when Frontier visited, but nearby residents said the office was more of a dormitory, and staff were still living there and working at the M Tower site. The company also did not respond to emailed questions. However, the Chinese firm’s problems appear to have affected several other projects in Myanmar, including Min Residences, a high-end condominium development in Yangon’s Mayangone Township comprising more than 600 apartments. Sino Great Wall corporate filings show that it won a $120 million EPC contract from Mottama and Singapore-listed Oxley Holdings to build the project’s three towers in January 2016, at the same time as the M Tower contract. Despite assurances from Mottama and Oxley that work would begin in September 2017, little progress appears to have been made. Sino Great Wall has also won three contracts from Oxley totalling nearly $500 million for property projects in Cambodia. But the three firms had even bigger plans in Myanmar..."