  We point out that a sizable strong phase could be generated from the penguin
annihilation in the soft-collinear effective theory for B meson decays. Keeping
a small scale suppressed by O(Lambda/m_b), Lambda being a hadronic scale and
m_b the b quark mass, in the denominators of internal particle propagators
without expansion, the resultant strong phase can accommodate the data of the
B^0 -> K^-+ pi^+- direct CP asymmetry. Our study reconciles the opposite
conclusions on the real or complex penguin annihilation amplitude drawn in the
soft-collinear effective theory and in the perturbative QCD approach based on
k_T factorization theorem.
