Born in 1991, the year The Talking Heads stopped making music. I look around a packed venue to a sea of hopeful faces, lit by the glow of the screen. You’ve bawled it at 2 am in the underage serving hideouts of your youth, in your best Leaving Cert french “QU’EST QUE C’EST!?”. Even if you don’t know this one, you know this one. Stripped back to just an acoustic guitar and a minimal drum loop. The opening chords of Psycho Killer, our daily bread. We line the aisle of the venue waiting to receive our communion. An unlikely saviour in white suit and tennis shoes. Our gaunt prophet takes the shape of Talking Heads frontman, David Byrne. Tonight, we too are searching for something greater than ourselves. Heads cocked at an angle as if they’ve been summoned by the RTE Angelus bells. Nearly $280 million, more than half of the total amount of money paid to local subcontractors, has gone to a single Montenegro company, Bemax, formally owned by a onetime cafe owner who, before he moved into road building, had no previous experience in engineering work, according to MANS, the research group.The lights go down, backing music halts and all eyes face the stage. Even so, its cost estimates were considerably lower than the more than $900 million charged by the China Road and Bridge Corporation to build the 25-mile, but particularly difficult, stretch of the highway.Īn earlier feasibility study, in 2007, by Louis Berger, an engineering company in Paris, warned that traffic along the proposed highway would not be “high enough to justify” investment “from a purely financial basis.” But it added that “social, political and economic” factors “should be considered before making a decision on whether to continue with the proposed program.” Spajic said, will not default.Ī 2012 study led by a British company for Montenegro’s Ministry of Transport warned that construction costs would be unusually high because of the mountainous terrain.

Montenegro made its first payment on the Chinese loan last month and, Mr. He recently negotiated a so-called swap deal with European and American banks that effectively converted the Chinese dollar loan to euros with an interest rate of. “It was a horrible deal, obviously,” said Milojko Spajic, Montenegro’s new finance minister. Djukanovic that he should be wary of hiring the Chinese company, telling him that Poland had recently canceled its own highway contract with another Chinese firm and was suing it over shoddy work. Robert Gelbard, the Clinton administration’s Balkans envoy, recalled advising Mr. Bechtel proposed a more modest and less costly project but lost out to a more expansive and far more expensive proposal from China Road and Bridge Corporation. Djukanovic first floated the idea, several foreign companies, including Bechtel, the American engineering and construction giant, expressed an interest. But nearly all other documents relating to the Montenegrin highway have been classified as secret. “It sometimes seems as if they are building a rocket base, not a road,” said Dejan Milovac of MANS, a Montenegrin research group focused on anticorruption work and a longtime critic of the highway.Ī 2014 loan agreement with Exim Bank of China, a state lender, has been made public - and it revealed that China could seize property in the event of default as it did in Sri Lanka, where it grabbed the main port after the country fell behind on a Chinese loan. Djukanovic inspires little trust in Montenegro, especially since his own government enveloped the highway project in a thick cloud of secrecy. Having switched his own allegiances so many times, Mr.

Pro-Moscow members of Parliament are not represented in the new government, but, out of hostility to Mr. Djukanovic has presented the ruckus over the Chinese-built highway as another twist in what he views as Russian scheming to assert influence in Montenegro. Now out of power, though he still holds the largely ceremonial post of president, Mr. He led Montenegro to independence in 2006, making it the last former republic of Yugoslavia to become a separate state. Later, he turned to the United States, which overlooked his past in order to get Montenegro to join NATO, while also reaching out to China, which offered loans that neither American nor European banks thought wise. Djukanovic has thrived by playing off rival powers, aligning first with Serbia under Slobodan Milosevic, and then with wealthy investors from Russia, including tycoons close to the Kremlin. Djukanovic, who presided over the deal, ruling Montenegro from 1990 until his party’s election defeat last year, dismissed the new government’s complaints as “political noise,” insisting in an interview that China has no interest in meddling in Montenegro’s affairs.

Who sings road to nowhere