Mirae Asset Global Investments , Korea's largest asset manager, is looking to enlist support from institutional investors to deploy capital in Spanish greenfield infrastructure projects.
The firm intends to collect €100 million for a dedicated vehicle, which will target road and hospital PPPs across the country.
The fund is said to be a semi-blind pool vehicle, with little transpiring about its stated goals and strategy.
Mirae has reportedly been considering several projects for the fund, including a new metro line in Barcelona, a hospital in Madrid and a provincial government office building in Seville. This first batch of projects will receive an injection of capital worth €46 million by the end of February.
The fund is expected to yield steady annual returns of seven to eight percent on the projects, which are all state-administered.
The Korean firm is understood to have approached Scotland-based asset manager Aberdeen Asset Management to manage the fund, under an arrangement that would see the UK firm probe investment targets and report back to Mirae for investment decisions.
Spain is being favoured by Mirae at a time when rate and market conditions in the UK, Australia, and the US are deemed to have deteriorated. “We have been investing in social facilities and infrastructure globally since 2009 and Spain has caught our attention for its industry stability,” Mirae's spokesperson told Infrastructure Investor. “There were over 170 successful projects in 50 years.”
Mirae, which manages about $75 billion of assets globally, invests in assets ranging from securities and bonds to alternatives.
According to the Korea Financial Investment Association, Mirae's investment products deemed 'mid-risk', including those investing in overseas bonds or alternative asset classes, totalled KRW15 trillion ($12 billion; €11 billion).
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