When CK Hutchison and a consortium led by BlackRock announced a $US22.8 billion ($36.5 billion) deal involving most of Hutchison’s sprawling ports business last month, they highlighted the group’s acquisition of two Panamanian ports. That may have been a mistake.

The prominence given to the two ports – one at either end of the Panama Canal – was presumably done to placate Donald Trump.

Trump had been railing relentlessly at what he regards as China’s control of the canal, even though it is Panama that actually owns and regulates the usage of the strategic canal, and Hutchison is a Cayman Islands-registered, Hong Kong-listed, private business.

Hutchison’s 96-year-old multi-billionaire founder Li Ka-shing.Credit: Visual China Group via Getty Images

It overshadowed the fact that what’s being sold isn’t just two ports in Panama but 43 of the 53 ports in 23 countries within the Hutchison portfolio, including those in Sydney and Brisbane.

While it has retained, again for obvious political considerations, its 10 ports in mainland China and Hong Kong, Hutchison is effectively getting out of the ports business.

Highlighting the Panamanian ports inevitably provoked China, where there has been a storm of criticism of the deal within the state-owned media, much of it reposted by China’s authorities.

Hutchison and its 96-year-old multi-billionaire founder, Li Ka-shing, have been accused of “acting in concert with US hegemony” and succumbing to US economic coercion and bullying, and China has announced a review of the deal on national security and antitrust grounds.

Trump sees the sale of the CK Hutchison ports as a victory. China sees it as coercion. For the 96-year-old Hong Kong billionaire, it might just be a good opportunity.

The deal was supposed to be signed this week, but the

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