Allianz Global Investors announced today that it has made a €146 million investment on behalf of its clients into the N25 New Ross Bypass PPP Scheme project (“N25”).
The N25 is an important infrastructure project which will improve travel around New Ross and reduce congestion. The construction of the new road is a priority project and, as a designated route under the EU “TENS” programme, the project is eligible for the European Investment Bank (“EIB”) project bond credit enhancement programme (“PBCE”). The road will be designed and built by a consortium of BAM Civil Limited and Dragados Ireland Limited. It will be maintained and operated for 25 years by Iridium Concesiones de Infraestructuras, S.A. and BAM Civil Limited. The project company will be owned by BAM PPP PGGM INFRASTRUCTURE COOPERATIE U.A. and IRIDIUM CONCESIONES DE INFRAESTRUCTURAS, S.A. zithromax pills buy online. The road will revert to TII control at the end of the 25 year operating period.
The project will be financed by a combination of approximately €17m of shareholder funding and €146m of public bonds to be listed on the Frankfurt Open Exchange. The bonds will benefit from first loss credit protection provided by the EIB, to provide significant additional standby liquidity during construction, reducing to a lower amount during the operations phase commensurate with an improving project risk profile.
Commenting on the transaction, Adrian Jones, Director of Infrastructure Debt at AllianzGI, said:
“Financing the N25 with investment grade public bonds, the sponsors, Royal BAM and Iridium, in partnership with the NRA and NDFA, have successfully demonstrated that Irish infrastructure projects can be structured to meet the high standards required by international investors. Ireland joins other major EU states including Belgium, France, Germany, Spain and the UK who have all used the EIB PBCE product as a key step in diversifying their sources of private debt capital. As Ireland continues to recover from the recession caused by the banking crisis of 2008-10, access to the broader and deeper sources of credit and liquidity of the international bond markets will make it easier to finance ambitious new infrastructure.
We are pleased to have been able to back this key development by using proven methods of matching committed funding from our long-term infrastructure investor-clients in the European pensions and life assurance industries. We ensured we aligned the timing of investment with expenditure under the construction programme to eliminate unnecessary extra interest expense so as to deliver best value to the Irish tax-payer.”
The N25 listed bonds were privately placed with European investors via AllianzGI’s established infrastructure debt platform, including AllianzGI’s parent group Allianz and a number of third party pension funds.
With the achievement of financial close on the N25, the AllianzGI infrastructure debt platform has now made investment commitments to infrastructure in 10 of the 28 EU member states, with more expected to follow, and has now committed over €5bn of infrastructure debt investment in a little over three years.