Govt injects £66m into green investment programme

The UK government has given an additional £66m to a programme which seeks to catalyse investment in green products.

Chancellor Rishi Sunak announced yesterday (November 3) the funds will be available through the Mobilising Institutional Capital Through Listed Product Structures programme (Mobilist). The programme was launched in February by the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office and supports large scale investment through publicly listed markets.

It aims to support the development of new products which give people in developing countries better access to international capital markets to fund the infrastructure, technology and businesses they need to manage climate change.
In a statement yesterday (November 3) the Treasury said:

“When we help countries grow through enterprise and trade, and finance clean infrastructure, we create freer countries and freer people.’
‘The new financing will allow the programme to run a series of competitions and help more products to list on public markets.”

Chancellor Rishi Sunak

The winners of the first competition are:

• Chapel Hill Denham Management’s Africa Infrastructure Equity Fund
• FirstRand Bank and the UN Capital Development Fund’s exchange listed investment platform for sustainable infrastructure securitization
• InfraCo Africa and Helios Investment Partners’ The Climate Fund
• The Development Guarantee Group’s Green Guarantee Company

Alongside this announcement, the amount that will be given to the initial beneficiaries was announced. ThomasLloyd Group will receive up to £25m at the IPO of the ThomasLloyd Energy Impact Trust. The trust will be the first emerging markets renewable energy product to list on the London Stock Exchange. The trust has identified a pipeline of $750m (£550m) of assets, with more than 1,500 MW of energy-generating capacity. The trust will qualify as an Article 9 fund under the EU’s SFDR. The pan-African climate focussed fund, the InfraCo – Helios CLEAR (Climate, Energy Access and Resilience) Fund, will also receive investment subject to completion of the design of the vehicle and completion of due diligence.

Michael Sieg, chief executive officer at ThomasLloyd, said:

“The fact that the average ‘carbon cost’ of GDP in Asia is four times as high as that of the four largest economies in Europe, means that investment in renewable energy in Asia is vital to achieve a net-zero world.”

He added now was the time to deploy capital and secure attractive returns while making a fundamentally positive contribution to the environment.

“We are confident that with our identified pipeline of seed assets we can put the capital we raise to work rapidly and make a real impact on improving the environment and reducing emissions, having a positive impact on local communities through the creation of direct and indirect jobs, while delivering appealing returns for our investors.”