Blackrock Buys Adebayo Ogunlesi’s GIP for $12.5 Billion

Mr. Ogunlesi’s exploits in the world of global private infrastructure management often provoke a discussion about Nigeria’s economically ruinous infrastructure deficit and his native country’s lack of policies and incentives to tap into the deals-hungry world of private infrastructure investment.

BlackRock, the world’s biggest asset management company has just announced that it is buying Global Infrastructure Partners, a company founded by Nigerian investment banker, Adebayo Ogunlesi in a $12.5 billion deal. Mr. Adebayo Ogunlesi, an alumnus of King’s College Lagos and Harvard University, was chief client officer and vice chairman at Credit Suisse First Boston before leaving to start Global Infrastructure Partners.

His profile grew in Nigeria after Global Infrastructure Partners bought London Gatwick Airport in 2009. The main assets of GIP, of which Mr. Ogunlesi is Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, include Sydney Airport, the Port of Melbourne, the Suez water group, extensive green energy holdings, and a stake in a big shale oil pipeline. Investment in infrastructure is considered as “alternative asset” class for traditional money managers like BlackRock. The deal makes Blackrock the second biggest private investor and manager of public infrastructure in the world.

 

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A Cash Plus Shares Deal Leaves Adebayo Ogunlesi Major Blackrock Shareholder 

Blackrock is to pay $3 billion in cash and offer Mr. Adebayo Ogunlesi and 5 other co-founders of Global Infrastructure Partners 12 million shares in Blackrock, thus making them the second biggest shareholders in the global asset management giant. Mr. Ogunlesi says that some of the cash and shares will be distributed to Global Infrastructure Partners’ 400 employees.

Mr. Adebayo Ogunlesi is from  Makun, Sagamu, Ogun State; his father Theophilus O. Ogunlesi is the first Nigerian professor of Medicine at the University of Ibadan. After graduating from King’s College Lagos, he obtained a first-class honours degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from Oxford University. In 1979, Ogunlesi received a J.D. magna cum laude from Harvard Law School and later obtained an M.B.A. from the Harvard Business School.

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Global Infrastructure Partners has invested about $106 bn in infrastructure, while Blackrock manages  $10 trillion worth of alternative assets. Mr. Adebayo Ogunlesi’s exploits in the world of global private infrastructure management often provoke a discussion about Nigeria’s economically ruinous infrastructure deficit and his native country’s lack of policies and incentives to tap into the deals-hungry world of private infrastructure investment.

Nigeria’s Bureau of Public Infrastructure and the Nigerian Infrastructure Concession Regulatory Commission, the vast bureaucracy in charge of private investment in infrastructure have not done a major successful deal in more than 10 years.

 

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