There may not be another firm to award the contract to. I read on another thread that the only other companies that could have bid on this contract are from Hong Kong and Singapore, and that they declined to place bids. No American firm offered a bid. If this is so, what are we going to do, force a US company to take over the physical assets and contractual obligations of the British company?
This may be a case of only a very small numer of companies being able to do this kind of work, sort of like Halliburton in their field. I'd have to research this to see if it's the case.
CFC, I have looked everywhere and found the same information you did. There really isn't much choice (particularly since the Singapore and Hong Kong cos. aren't interested in the US port business).
Mad_Tom has a list of port management companies, but the vast majority (I didn't check them all) are Port Authorities who don't subcontract their container management, or companies that don't even deal with containers (like the cruise lines).
My only question is how did so many people get whipped up into a frenzy about something they don't understand, and may not even matter?