And it was a high-bid contract.
In November 2021, Fox Business reported that the impending sale of a “US toll giant to Singapore-based firm” was evoking concerns about security. The company about to be sold was TransCore. The company about to be getting TransCore was Singapore Technologies Engineering. The majority shareholder of ST Engineering was Temasek Holdings, which “does substantial business in China.”
Your toll-route patterns
According to a transportation expert unnamed in the 2021 Fox story, the TransCore data could be used to track persons by identifying a person’s toll-route patterns. The movements and private information of some persons using E-Z Pass would be of especially great interest to a foreign power out to cause trouble for the United States.
Fox noted: “Nashville-based TransCore is responsible for roughly 70% of the tolls Americans pay through operations like its E-ZPass payment system, used in ‘24 of the 25 states that have toll roads,’ according to an SEC filing from 2017.”
The national security concerns were raised before the ST Engineering purchase of TransCore was completed, and were apparently ignored.
Now we learn that TransCore “is reigniting national security concerns over its links to China, after it won the E-ZPass contract for the New Jersey Turnpike for $250 million more than the American company that has operated it for 22 years” (Fox Business, February 5, 2025).
In September, the New Jersey Turnpike Authority awarded TransCore—owned by Singapore Technologies Engineering, known as ST Engineering—the full authority to run the operation for $1.73 billion, beating out Newark’s Conduent, Inc., whose final offer was $1.479 billion….
Conduent filed an appeal over Nashville-based TransCore’s award, voicing concerns that owner ST Engineering’s parent company, Temasek Holdings, is wholly owned by the government of Singapore, with substantial ties to China.
Until recently, Fu Chengyu, a longtime chairman of state-owned Chinese oil companies—whom the protest points to as a high-ranking member of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) with connections to China’s United Front—was a member of Temasek’s board of directors.
Why did Fu step down from the board? Apparently as a result of Conduent’s protest.
Your address, credit card, driver’s license, license plate
This kind of shuffling to improve appearances means nothing. It wouldn’t cause any Chinese Communist Party influence over ST Engineering and TransCore to evaporate. If the Party had access to drivers’ “addresses, credit card numbers, driver’s license information and license plate numbers”—and toll-route patterns—before Fu flew, it has that access still.
Especially since Fu “remains influential within Temasek as a director of a China-specific subsidiary of the company, according to the investment firm’s announcement of his departure from the board.”
Fu gets around.
