Latest news with #UniversitiesSuperannuationScheme
Yahoo
7 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Pensions insurer Rothesay joins suitors for O2 ground rent deal
Britain's biggest pensions insurance specialist has joined the race to buy the 999-year lease of the O2, London's best-known entertainment venue. Sky News has learnt that Rothesay, which has more than £70bn of assets under management, is among the bidders for the long-term income stream generated by the arena in North Greenwich. Rothesay and the Universities Superannuation Scheme - along with a small number of undisclosed bidders - are participating in an auction being run by Eastdil, the real estate-focused investment bank. None of the parties has secured exclusivity, although insiders suggested such a development was unlikely to be far away. Money blog: Millions of Nationwide customers to receive £100 Rothesay has become one of Britain's most successful specialist insurers, having been established in 2007. It now protects the pensions of more than 1m people in Briton and makes more than £300m in pension payouts every month. The auction of the O2's ground rent has been under way for several months, with Sky News having revealed by Cambridge University's wealthiest college. Trinity College, which ranks among Britain's biggest landowners, acquired the site in 2009 for a reported £24m. The O2, which shrugged off its "white elephant" status in the aftermath of its disastrous debut as the Millennium Dome in 2000, has since become one of the world's leading entertainment venues. Operated by Anschutz Entertainment Group (AEG), it has played host to a wide array of music, theatrical and sporting events over nearly a quarter of a century. Trinity College, which was founded by Henry VIII in 1546, bought the O2 lease from Lend Lease and Quintain, the property companies which had taken control of the Millennium Dome site in 2002 for nothing. A spokesman for Rothesay declined to comment.
Times
12-05-2025
- Business
- Times
UK economy boosted as USS invests in Blackstone data centre plan
Britain's largest private sector pension fund has emerged as a backer of the £10 billion data centre project that has taken over the site of Britishvolt's ill-fated attempt to build a gigafactory in Northumberland. The Universities Superannuation Scheme plans to invest as much as £250 million over time in the Blackstone-led initiative and has already made an initial, undisclosed investment in the plan. It comes after Blackstone acquired the land, which was previously home to the old Blyth power station, last year after the collapse of the start-up Britishvolt in January 2023. Britishvolt had ambitions to use the derelict site to construct a £3.8 billion plant that would have supplied battery packs to hundreds of thousands of electric cars every year. It was championed by
Telegraph
24-03-2025
- Business
- Telegraph
Blame Heathrow's faceless foreign owners for airport's meltdown
After a rejig a year of its shareholder register just over a year ago, one of our most vital pieces of infrastructure is now in the hands of a combination of a French private equity house, the Qatari regime, the Saudi state, the Singaporean government, an Australian retirement trust, the Chinese government, a Spanish construction giant and a Canadian pension fund. That's eight foreign investors from just about every corner of the globe. Only one of its backers is British: pension house Universities Superannuation Scheme (USS), and with just 2.1pc of the equity, it is Heathrow's smallest shareholder. Therefore its inability to influence proceedings must be negligible at best. France's Ardian and the Saudi Public Investment Fund are recent investors so it is too soon to judge whether their stewardship offers any hope for a break from the past. However, the rest have been in the Heathrow control tower for more than a decade, in some cases nearly two, and have proven themselves to be thoroughly unsuitable custodians, routinely prioritising fat dividends over much-needed investment. With Spain's Ferrovial leading the charge, this international consortium has demonstrated two things very clearly. First, it has persistently milked Heathrow for its own gains, at times to the obvious detriment of the airport's ability to function properly. Second, because its constituents are spread across multiple overseas jurisdictions, they are utterly unaccountable to the taxpaying UK holidaymaker. Such a setup is completely unsustainable if Britain is to avoid becoming a third-world country where everything has stopped working. What we are seeing at Thames Water and Heathrow are the chickens finally coming home to roost on the UK's desperately muddled approach to foreign investment. It is nearly 20 years since Ferrovial was allowed, thanks to a remarkable display of complacency and naivety on the part of the Blair government, to swoop in and buy a total of five major UK airports – Heathrow, Gatwick, Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Southampton – in a cut-price £10bn takeover deal financed almost entirely by external debt. If it wasn't obvious then that this was a thoroughly wretched deal, it became undeniable when the financial crash struck. With Ferrovial struggling to refinance the mountain of loans attached to the airport's holding company BAA amid chaos in the financial markets, it was forced to sell a series of stakes to additional investors. Heathrow soon became a costly experiment in extreme financial engineering, its debts ballooning as the consortium prioritised eye-watering dividends over investment. Between 2012 and 2020, they extracted £4bn. The shareholders even saw fit to help themselves to a £100m payout during the pandemic when air travel was often grounded for long periods, and when it wasn't, the airport was beset by flight chaos and baggage bedlam. After a five-year pause, dividends were resumed this year with a £250m payment. Meanwhile, in the last two years alone, Heathrow has forked out nearly £2.4bn in interest payments on a vast debt pile of nearly £17bn. What has taken place is a vast transfer of wealth from the pockets of long-suffering travellers into the treasury departments of absentee owners thousands of miles away from south-west London. Had that capital been spent fortifying Heathrow from external shocks, one imagines the chances of such a meltdown taking place would have been greatly reduced. The airport was warned in 2014 and again in 2022 that it was overly reliant on a small number of power sources to keep it fully functioning. Meanwhile, in 2021, Heathrow itself acknowledged that underinvestment 'could threaten major erosion to service and resilience and potentially even the safe operation of the airport'. What action was taken? One assumes little if any. Neso's investigation must get answers. But surely questions also need to be asked about overseas ownership of vital UK assets. The pandemic should have sparked a total reassessment of our resilience. In an age of Trump and heightened protectionism, self-sufficiency needs to be firmly at the top of the national agenda again in the form of a separate review. In the same way that data centres have all been built with backup plans, other vital assets need to incorporate the same reinforcements. Yet we have been left at the whim of foreign interests, powerless to intervene and determine our own fate. It is self-harm at its most severe. We may never get to find out, but I am convinced that if Heathrow was controlled by long-term UK pension funds such as Legal and General, M&G or Standard Life, it would not have been allowed to become so neglected. Might there also be a case for the newly created, taxpayer-backed National Wealth Fund to become a cornerstone investor in our most strategically important assets, ensuring the Treasury has the ability to ensure they are being managed responsibly, or for golden shares to become more widespread again? It is often forgotten that the government was forced to relinquish its golden share of Heathrow and BAA's other airports in 2003. The European Court of Justice ruled that it was contrary to EU principles of free movement of capital.
Yahoo
17-02-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
UK's Assura rejects $2 billion proposal from KKR, pension fund
(Reuters) -British healthcare property developer Assura has rejected a 1.56-billion-pound ($2 billion) proposal from KKR and pension fund Universities Superannuation Scheme, the U.S.-based private equity group said on Monday. Assura's shares jumped nearly 18% to 46 pence, still just over half of their peak price of 88 pence in 2020. Deal-making activity in Britain picked up last year, as cheaper valuations and falling or stable interest rates made financing easier for buyouts. A Deutsche Numis poll showed that private equity firms expect a rise in deal activity in 2025. KKR said it had made four indicative, non-binding proposals to Assura, the latest of which was at 48 pence per share, a 28.2% premium to Assura's closing price on February 13, but was rejected by the British company's board. "KKR is considering whether there is any merit in continuing to try and engage with the board," the U.S. group said in a statement. In a separate statement, Universities Superannuation Scheme said that it did not intend to make an offer for Assura, as part of the consortium or otherwise. It was not immediately clear if KKR was considering an independent offer. The group did not immediately respond to Reuters' request for further comment. Assura declined to comment. The company undertook asset disposals last year to bolster its balance sheet. It was running more than 600 properties with an investment value of about 3.2 billion pounds as of September, and counts Britain's state-backed National Health Service as a customer. "(Assura) is well-managed, has a high quality portfolio and many attributes of obvious attraction to the bidder," Shore Capital analyst Andrew Saunders said in a note. Under British takeover rules, KKR and USS have until March 14 to make a firm offer for Assura or walk away. ($1 = 0.7940 pounds) Sign in to access your portfolio
Zawya
17-02-2025
- Business
- Zawya
UK's Assura rejects $2bln proposal from KKR, pension fund
British healthcare real estate investment trust Assura has rejected a 1.56 billion pound ($1.96 billion) proposal from KKR and pension fund Universities Superannuation Scheme, the U.S.-based private equity group said on Monday. KKR said it had made four indicative, non-binding proposals to Assura, the latest of which was at 48 pence per share and was rejected by the British company's board. "KKR is considering whether there is any merit in continuing to try and engage with the board," the U.S. group said in a statement. In a separate statement, Universities Superannuation Scheme said that it did not intend to make an offer for Assura, as part of the consortium or otherwise. It was not immediately clear if KKR was considering an independent offer. ($1 = 0.7940 pounds)
