A tragic highway crash that killed two men in June shadowed, perhaps fittingly, what may have been the last breath for a Chinese construction conglomerate's expansion into Europe.

The victims were Chinese workers hired to build a section of a Warsaw-to-Berlin highway under a 1.3 billion zloty Polish contract awarded to state-owned China Overseas Engineering Group Co. (COVEC), a unit of China Railway Construction Co.

While relatives in Sichuan and Guangdong provinces prepared to receive the dead men's remains, COVEC officials were pulling out of the A2 highway project.