The world’s largest infrastructure investor has launched a new infrastructure debt business, which has raised $500m from Swiss Re. Following BlackRock’s announcement of a new infra debt team earlier this week, it is clear that this previously nascent trend now has strong momentum.
The London-based infrastructure investment firm has acquired the 8MW La Souterraine wind project in Limousin from Spanish wind energy business Gamesa. The purchase comes from Impax’s €330m NEF II fund.
The French fund manager has purchased 2,166 telecom towers in France from Bouygues. Today marks the first close on 1,873 towers with the rest to be transferred during the first quarter of 2013. Bouygues will retain a 15% stake in the assets.
Philippe Benaroya, Chris Wrenn and Gilles Lengaigne – who worked together at Blackstone/GSO for over 10 years – are launching BlackRock’s European infrastructure debt investment unit in London. The team will target investment grade infrastructure debt investments for insurers and other investors.
Heiko Schupp, who joined London-based funds of funds manager Pantheon in November last year, has now joined the London office of Australia’s Hastings Funds Management as an investment director.
Start-up fund manager Prostar Capital, which was launched earlier this year, has reached a significant milestone for its fund. The firm, which has offices in Sydney, Connecticut and Singapore, is targeting global energy and energy infrastructure opportunities.
International Public Partnerships Limited, the UK-listed infrastructure investment company, is tapping into a strong deal flow. It has put to work £166m of the £200m it raised in June this year.
The consortium operating the road – which includes Macquarie and Queensland Investment Corporation – has called a halt to trading of its securities after much lower-than-expected traffic potentially cut the road‘s enterprise value to less than its $3bn of outstanding debt.
The Dutch investor is in a consortium with Hochtief, Royal Boskalis Westminster and VolkerWessels that has taken the lead for the contract to rebuild, widen and maintain the A1 and A6 motorways.
The emerging markets private equity and infrastructure investor is participating in the development of two solar plants and one wind farm in South Africa requiring investments of over €500m.
Having completed a wind farm transaction in Poland at the end of last month, Marguerite has quickly followed up with a second transaction of the same type in Central and Eastern Europe. Private equity firm EnerCap has also backed the latest deal.
European infrastructure investors may well be hoping the UK fails to get its way in the battle over the EU budget.
The UK-listed investment firm has committed £15m to Dalmore Capital Fund, which targets Private Finance Initiative deals and which announced a £130m first closing on its debut fund last month.
The investment arm of Canada’s Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System (OMERS) has agreed to buy almost half of the class A shares in a portfolio of US wind farm assets from Spanish renewable energy firm EDP Renováveis.
Alan Rubenstein, chief executive of the Pension Protection Fund, argued that pension money is available for infrastructure, but excessive leverage, misalignment of interests between GPs and LPs, as well as difficulty in accessing greenfields has discouraged more investment to date.