— Photo: Email handout

FINANCING INFRASTRUCTURE: (from left): Y. Miyauchi, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of ORIX Corporation, Makoto Inoue, Union Finance Minister, P. Chidambaram, and the Chairman and Managing Director of IL&FS, Ravi Parthasarathy, at the signing ceremony for a joint venture in Tokyo on Wednesday.

TOKYO: ORIX Corporation of Japan and Infrastructure Leasing & Financial Services Limited (IL&FS) have entered into a joint venture agreement (reported briefly earlier) to sponsor and manage a Pan-Asia Project Development Fund (The Fund) with a target size of $100 million. IL&FS and ORIX have each committed $10 million to the fund, which will finance the development of infrastructure projects in principal Asian markets such as Indonesia, The Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam.

The Union Finance Minister, P. Chidambaram, the Chairman and Chief Executive officer of ORIX Corporation, Y. Miyauchi, and the Chairman and Managing Director of IL&FS, Ravi Parthasarathy, were present on the occasion.

Speaking on the occasion, Anup Thakur, Economic Minister, Embassy of India in Japan, said, "We are pleased with this initiative which is a true bilateral partnership between Indian and Japanese corporations. It is our expectation that a host of infrastructure initiatives with attendant project exports from the two countries can result from this effort."

The Asian infrastructure sector offers attractive investment opportunities, and as per a study conducted by the World Bank, ADB, and JBIC, developing Asian countries alone will need to spend more than $1 trillion over the next five years in various infrastructure sectors such as surface transport, urban infrastructure, communications and utilities. The investment manager of the fund is IL&FS Asian Infrastructure Managers Limited, a joint venture company set up by IL&FS Investment Managers Limited (IIML), the private equity investment arm of IL&FS, and ORIX Corporation.

While IL&FS is the principal shareholder in IIML, Bank of India and IFC, Washington, are the other prominent institutional shareholders.

Printer friendly page  
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail