Africa Railways, a platform company of Egyptian private equity and infrastructure investor Citadel Capital, has secured a $40m loan from the African Development Bank as a key subsidiary shows improved performance. This is expected to be part of a ’much bigger’ future debt package.
Investors in renewable energy projects may benefit from the approval earlier this week of the UK’s infrastructure National Policy Statements, which include plans to speed up the approval process for such projects.
As more institutional investors buy infrastructure assets directly, they will be hoping that their risk/return calculations pay off.
AXA Private Equity, which earlier this week announced a major French wind farm investment, has now unveiled a new solar energy joint venture with Italian industrial company Tozzi Group. The joint venture builds on a partnership AXA and Tozzi formed in 2007.
Having used several Private Finance Initiative (PFI) schemes as test cases, the UK’s Treasury now believes it can achieve £1.5bn of savings from the 495 PFI projects operational in England. The government has been fiercely critical of the costs of such schemes.
The Spanish bank was the most prolific mandated lead arranger of infrastructure financings globally in the second quarter of this year, having been involved in a wide variety of deals including by far the quarter’s largest – the $11.3bn Tours-Bordeaux high-speed rail project.
The winning consortium has achieved financial close for the Gunfleet Sands offshore transmission project in the UK. All of the equity for the project is being provided by INPP, the London-listed infrastructure investor, while Barclays, BNP Paribas and Lloyds are providing senior debt.
Airports operator BAA says it will consider a judicial review against the final decision of the UK’s Competition Commission (CC) that it needs to sell London’s Stansted Airport plus one of its Scottish airports – a process that the CC says should start within three months.
AXA Private Equity has teamed up with French renewables producer neoen to agree the acquisition of the renewable energy activities of Poweo ENR from Austrian electricity firm Verbund. The deal will make the Paris-based private equity firm France’s fourth-largest wind farm operator.
Following the earlier announcement that Isolux Corsan has unified its global concession activities into a single business, US alternative assets firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and German insurer Munich Re have taken a 49% stake in assets operated by its solar photovoltaic subsidiary, Grupo T-Solar.
The London-based law firm has hired Rinku Bhadoria as a partner in its energy and infrastructure group from rival Clifford Chance. The move follows two other recent hires as the group continues to expand.
The Spanish developer has consolidated all its worldwide concessions operations into one business, Isolux Infrastructure Projects. The business will have capital expenditure of €7.5bn for all the projects in which it is currently involved.
The Austrian bank has backed the acquisition of a state-of-the-art hospital in Warsaw, Poland, in recognition of strong growth in Central and Eastern Europe’s healthcare sector.
A consortium of insurance companies and pension funds, led by Commerzbank subsidiary Commerz Real, has reached agreement to acquire a 74.9% stake in Amprion, the largest of four German transmission system operators, from RWE.
Anthony Edwards has followed Alec Montgomery from RBS to fund manager Industry Funds Management (IFM) in New York. When Montgomery left RBS for IFM in 2008, Edwards assumed the role as RBS’ head of infrastructure financing for North America that Montgomery left behind.