Cezary Podkul
The property developer has hired former Merrill Lynch managing director Duncan Taylor to build a fund management platform in Australia, where Lend Lease recently acquired Bilfinger Berger’s Australian business and has teamed up with a group of former Babcock & Brown pros to source deals.
Senior managing directors Michael Dorrell and Trent Vichie will form a new team that will continue fundraising for their debut infrastructure fund, which has so far attracted $400m in third-party capital.
Richard Anthony, head of Evercore Partners Private Funds Group, said ‘there will not be enough capital to satisfy all the demand’ and as a result many big-ticket fund managers will have to slash their fundraising targets.
The design, financing and construction of a terminal for bus and rail traffic in downtown Atlanta attracted interest from a John Buck and Jacoby Development partnership, Cousins Properties and a Hines-HJ Russell JV.
The City Council’s approval paves the way for Los Angeles to release the final agreement to bidders interested in a 50-year concession on nine parking garages. A winning bidder could be selected in March.
The city’s airport management arm is seeking investor feedback on a deal that would privatise Los Angeles’ Ontario Airport without going through the Federal Aviation Administration’s pilot privatisation programme.
The fund is the first entirely debt-focused investment vehicle raised in Mexico using a new type of listed security called a certificado burasatile. The lender, Navix, plans to co-invest $100m of its money with the certificados busatiles on a variety of projects in the Mexican energy sector.
Chicago now has eight more months to decide whether to re-bid the airport. However, the Federal Aviation Administration warned that if another airport applied for Midway’s slot in its pilot privatisation programme before 31 July 2011, it would ‘evaluate both Chicago’s application and preliminary applications’ filed for the spot.
The swift negotiations highlight airlines’ changing attitudes toward airport privatisation, which was initially viewed with skepticism at the outset of the Midway Airport privatisation process but is being supported by the carriers who serve Luis Muñoz Marín International Airport in San Juan.
There will be five major groups of investors looking to raise some $80 billion for infrastructure in 2011. Where do you fit in, asks Cezary Podkul.