East Timor wants to cooperate with China in the oil and gas industry, but reports that Dili would borrow US$16 billion from China’s Export-Import Bank to finance one such project were a “hoax”, the country’s Foreign Minister Dionísio da Costa Babo Soares declared. Reports of the loan were “blown up by politically motivated people around the region”, Soares said, adding that East Timor actually needs much less to tap some of its last remaining oil and gas resources in the offshore Greater Sunrise field.
