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Rendell pushing to use Chinese loans for Convention Center

After being rebuffed during the summer, Gov. Rendell is again pushing the Convention Center Authority to consider using a loan program backed with Chinese funds to generate millions of dollars for the center.

After being rebuffed during the summer, Gov. Rendell is again pushing the Convention Center Authority to consider using a loan program backed with Chinese funds to generate millions of dollars for the center.

Rendell raised the subject during phone calls last week with some of the authority's board members, according to several people familiar with the proposal.

While no details have been finalized - including the interest rate, amount to be lent, and how the center would use the money - Rendell is hoping to persuade the board to embrace the loan program in a resolution to be introduced as early as tomorrow, the sources said.

Sponsored by the federal government and known locally as the "Welcome Fund," the loan program offers green cards to wealthy immigrants who want permanent residency in this country.

In exchange, those immigrant investors - who are also vetted by the U.S. customs and immigration services - help finance regional economic development projects by issuing low-interest loans.

But the program may not be available for much longer. It was set to expire last September, and Congress has extended the Welcome Fund - and similar loan programs also launched as pilot projects elsewhere in the country - only until March.

"At a time when investment capital is very difficult to obtain due to the financial crisis, the Welcome Fund can provide some of the private capital that is critical to the success of economic development initiatives throughout the commonwealth," Rendell spokesman Chuck Ardo said in an e-mail yesterday.

"We strongly support such job-creating investment in our economy, both with respect to the Pennsylvania Convention Center as well as many other transactions around the state."

In the case of the Convention Center, 150 Chinese investors have already spent about $500,000 each, with the total of $73.5 million placed in an escrow account in a U.S. bank.

But despite overtures from Rendell, the center's board has yet to approve participation in the loan program.

Convention Center board chairman Buck Riley did not return a call yesterday.

But in July, he told The Inquirer: "We considered it. We looked at it. But it was kind of a bridge too far . . . too complex for us to consider."

He added: "Right now, it is a dead issue."

Yesterday, Peter Longstreth, president of the Philadelphia Industrial Development Corp. (PIDC), said he was unaware of any change in the Convention Center's position.

"I just don't know of anything particularly new," Longstreth said.

The PIDC, a quasi-public agency, oversees the Welcome Fund jointly with a private New York firm, CanAm Enterprises, which has worked on immigrant investor deals for two decades. It was CanAm that raised the Convention Center money from each of the Chinese investors.

Kevin Feeley, a spokesman for CanAm, declined to comment yesterday.

CanAm also works with the state Department of Community and Economic Development to identify potential projects throughout the state that could benefit from low-interest financing.

But with no deal at the Convention Center, the loan program lost credibility with additional potential investors in China, possibly making it more difficult to generate interest in economic development projects elsewhere in Pennsylvania.

Xu Yangqing, a Harvard medical student, said his sister, her husband and their two children have been waiting close to a year to learn whether the money they spent will be used on the Convention Center. When he last spoke with them, during a visit to China during the Olympics, he said, a CanAm representative told them "the problem is going to be solved."

But so far, Xu said, "there's been nothing."