Abu Dhabi fund to take 15% Gatwick stake
5.2.2010 (Financial Times)
By Pilita Clark, Aerospace Correspondent, and Henny Sender
The owners of Gatwick have sold another stake in the airport, this time to the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, one of the world’s leading sovereign wealth funds.
News of the move comes in the same week that the Financial Times reported South Korea’s National Pension Service, the fifth biggest pension fund in the world, had agreed to take a 12 per cent stake in Gatwick. That stake represented an investment of just under £100m, the NPS said.
The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (Adia) is believed to have taken a stake of close to 15% in the airport, which was sold late last year to the Global Infrastructure Partners investment fund, owners of London City Airport, for just over £1.5bn.
GIP disclosed at the time the deal was finalised in December that it planned to sell some minority stakes in the airport, as part of portfolio management, but would retain overall control.
Adia is looking to regain ground after suffering big losses on a $7.5bn (£4.7bn) investment in Citigroup, which has seen it file an arbitration claim against the bank. The fund has also suffered losses on private equity investments. Adia could not be reached for comment.
A spokesman for GIP said the group welcomed ADIA as a long term investor in Gatwick, the second busiest airport in the UK. The spokesman declined to say precisely how much Adia had paid.
GIP bought Gatwick from BAA, the UK’s biggest airport operator and owner of Heathrow, after competition authorities ruled it should sell Gatwick, Stansted and either Edinburgh or Glasgow airports to meet competition concerns.
The Gatwick sale was agreed before BAA, a subsidiary of Spain’s Ferrovial infrastructure group, unexpectedly won an appeal against the ruling, which has clouded the future of the sales of Stansted and one of the Scottish airports.
Passenger numbers at Gatwick rose for a 3rd consecutive month in December, the airport said last week, helping to reduce its full-year decline to -5.3 %.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/321f740c-11e1-11df-b6e3-00144feab49a.html?ftcamp=rss&nclick_check=1
(5th February 2010)
Copyright AirportWatch, 2004