Gerelyn Terzo

Morgan Stanley prevailed in a competitive bidding process for a potential 99-year lease of Port Botany, one of Australia’s busiest trade hubs. The lease could net the Australian state of New South Wales up to A$2.2bn.

New York is closer to the reconstruction of the nearly six-decade old Tappan Zee Bridge with the launch of a Request for Qualifications for its design and build. Private sector funding is still tentative, but governor Cuomo signalled he would like to see pension funds get involved.

The $630m Macquarie Renaissance Infrastructure Fund, which targets Russia and the CIS countries, has invested in a power plant in St. Petersburg. With its second investment, the fund has now put to work more than $200m.

A group of five banks are extending a $380m debt facility that originally expired in August 2012, leaving the Australian toll road operator with no senior debt maturing before 2014.

Since 2005, 22 of 28 announced transportation transactions have successfully reached financial close, a ‘substantially higher [completion rate] than most market participants realise’, Greenhill’s Andrew Deye (pictured) highlighted at Infrastructure Investor Americas 2011.

A subsidiary of the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority is now the owner of a minority stake in the UK’s largest water company. The sellers were two Macquarie funds and a third-party investor.

Stephen Goldsmith (pictured) – former mayor of Indianapolis – argued that both the public and private sectors have to be ‘creative’ and more ‘sensitive to one another’s perspective’ at the Infrastructure Investor Americas 2011 conference, in New York.

The state’s Department of Transportation is pushing for its maiden public-private partnership (PPP) to facilitate the expansion of Interstate 70 (pictured). Discussions remain in the preliminary stages, but if materialised the project could require financing of up to $4bn.

Virginia’s Department of Transportation has reached an agreement in principle with a Fluor/Transurban team on the major commercial terms of a 28-mile highway extension. Financial close is set for the second quarter of 2012.

Christophe Lefort joins the law firm’s Paris office from developer Bouygues. Lefort has decades of experience and will advise firms on construction and financing for infrastructure projects.