Bruno Alves
The consortium has paid £105m to buy a transmission link to an offshore UK wind farm from DONG, Scottish and Southern Energy, PGGM and Ampere Equity Fund. The European Investment Bank is backing the deal with £52m of debt.
Five banks are backing the Italian developer to help finance a satellite-based tolling system for heavy vehicles across France. Atlantia suffered a convoluted procurement process for the contract, at one point seeing the tender annulled by a French court.
The European Commission is proposing to use €230m to fund a test phase for its Europe 2020 Project Bond initiative, to be implemented in 2012-2013. The pilot programme, part of a wider €50bn infrastructure facility, will target up to 10 projects and ‘is expected to mobilise investments of up to €4.6bn’.
The ‘Connecting Europe Facility’ will be unveiled next week and will focus exclusively on trans-European transport, energy and ICT projects. Between 15% and 20% of the proposed €50bn in spending will be leveraged through financial instruments and public-private partnerships.
Moody’s believes Amprion’s €3.3bn, 10-year capex programme ‘will not only burden the company’s financial performance, but also test its technical and managerial capabilities’. A consortium of institutional investors led by Commerz Real spent €1.3bn recently acquiring 74.9% of Amprion.
The European Union is planning to spend some €1.5trn to interconnect the continent’s transport networks over the next 20 years. With national budgets stretched to the limit, the private sector is a natural port of call. But investors are sceptical.
A club of 12 banks is providing a seven-year loan to fund the team’s recent acquisition of GDF Suez’s Italian gas grid and re-leverage two other local gas grids bought over the last two years. AXA/F2i is now Italy’s second-largest gas distributor.
By requesting a $200m bond to participate in a $5bn roads privatisation, the Turkish government is indicating that only serious bidders need apply. It will now face pressure to run a quick and efficient tender process, maintains Bruno Alves
A Freshfield survey shows that Europe’s infrastructure industry supports the Europe 2020 Project Bond initiative. But investors want more clarity on how it will work and a speedy implementation. The latter is also defended by the EIB president (pictured).
‘The strong credit quality of the asset class and resilient contractual structures’ has helped European public-private partnerships withstand the financial crisis well. But deteriorating public finances, ongoing austerity and a constrained bank market pose risks for the industry.