There will be more money coming by India’s way from the UK. The UK government-backed private equity emerging markets fund of funds manager CDC Group has committed almost $1 billion to a new emerging markets infrastructure fund, managed by Actis. This includes $750 million to the Actis Infrastructure Fund 2; besides CDC will seed infrastructure assets valued at approximately $167 million to the fund.
The funds will be deployed in Africa, South and South East Asia, and India is one of the countries that will benefit from the fund. AI2 is likely to invest most of its funds in the power sector and will also look at selective investment opportunities in transport, telecoms and energy. It plans to invest a significant proportion of its commitments in development stage investments and also in greenfield projects and mobile power generation. The Actis Infrastructure Fund 2 will be led by Mike Till and Torbjorn Caesar.
The publicly listed CDC is a UK government-owned fund of funds, with net assets of $4 billion. They invest out of its balance sheet in private equity funds focused on the emerging markets of Asia, Africa and Latin America, with particular emphasis on South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. Before 2004, CDC used to make direct investments, which included the Globeleq assets being seeded into the AI2 Fund. Actis was spun out of CDC Group in 2004.
As for India, the infrastructure space has been attracting funds from the UK. The London-based 3i Group had last year floated a $500-million 3i India Infrastructure Fund, with commitments from 3i and 3i Infrastructure Ltd. This fund invested $227 million for a minority stake in Adani Power, $101 million in Hyderabad based Soma Enterprise and also in Mundra Port of the Adani Group.

Posted on 01/30/08, 11:58 AM
in: Private Equity
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