April 17, 2008 (LPAC)--Macquarie Bank is spearheading an Australian-based, but British-directed financial assault on China by a complex of "Australian" banks and insurance companies. Macquarie has held talks with "key Chinese ministries, regulators and investors about establishing China's first domestic infrastructure fund," reported the April 15 Sydney Morning Herald (SMH). Mandarin-speaking Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is fronting for Macquarie, and lunched with Chinese executives and regulators in Beijing earlier this week to push the idea. "One of the core propositions that I am putting to the Chinese government for consideration is to expand the number of Australian funds managers who are able to operate here in the Chinese market," Rudd said.

Macquarie, first established as the British imperial Hill Samuel Bank's Australian subsidiary in 1969, bought the broking business of the Anglo-Dutch ING Barings in 2004, and advised the China Railway Construction Corporation in a $5.6 billion Hong Kong and Shanghai stock offering, China's largest float this year and "the second-largest globally", according to the SMH.

Macquarie Bank is one of several Australian-based companies already active in China, including the Commonwealth Bank, the National Australia Bank (NAB), and the Australian Mutual Providence (AMP) giant, which has an infrastructure-financing partnership with China's largest institutional investor, the China Life Asset Insurance Management Company.

The SMH also notes that Macquarie is working with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley to secure a role in "future floats and acquisitions involving some of China's largest companies." Z-Ben Advisors, a Shanghai-based advisory firm, reports that Macquarie et al. are targetting China's three main sovereign wealth funds: the $200 billion China Investment Capital Corporation; the government's main pension fund; and the China-Africa development firm. These three funds are forecast to triple in size by 2010 to $729 billion; the scale of the China-African development firm as one of the three, bespeaks the magnitude of China's positive role in Africa, one which has drawn the wrath of the British Empire as physical economist Lyndon LaRouche, Jr. has emphasized recently. This Australian-based financial warfare against China flows from the use of Australia as the British Empire's stepping stone in Asia, as per recent calls to that effect by British Foreign Secretary David Miliband and Trade and Investment Minister Lord Digby Jones.