UK Climate Change and Industry Minister Nick Hurd MP today announced in a statement that HM Government (HMG) has agreed to sell UK Green Investment Bank plc (GIB) to a Macquarie-led consortium.
HMG subsequently issued a press releaseannouncing the acquisition, followed by an announcement by Macquarie.
"The GIB Board supported the decision to privatise GIB as it believed that attracting new investors was the best available route to securing the long-term future of the business and its growing green impact.
The UK Government has run the GIB sale process and has now reached a final decision on its outcome. The GIB Board has provided its views to Ministers at key stages. Those views related to the future prospects of GIB, its continuing growth and its leadership role in green investment. GIB is a highly valued institution and commitments over its future are important to its many stakeholders.
Macquarie has made significant and important commitments to the UK Government to maintain GIB as a discrete entity within its business, maintaining GIB’s investment focus and approach with a target to invest more capital each year than GIB has historically. Macquarie will also uphold GIB’s green investment principles and report transparently on GIB’s green impact. Macquarie will utilise the market-leading expertise of the existing GIB team and will build on GIB’s deep commitment to Edinburgh.
On the basis of these commitments, we believe Macquarie can be a good owner of GIB and we support the Government’s decision to sell GIB to Macquarie. We look forward to seeing these commitments from Macquarie delivered, in full, in the months and years ahead.
In addition, the involvement of USS and MEIF 5 as new investors in GIB’s assets is positive; these types of institutions are well-suited to the long-term ownership of large-scale green infrastructure assets. This approach mirrors GIB’s recent success in raising a £1bn offshore wind fund and selling three GIB assets to that fund.
In the four years since its inception GIB has become an important business in, and for, the UK. It is widely admired, across the world, as a stand-out success story and has provided a model of good policy that other countries are now following.
GIB in private ownership can, and should, continue to play an important leadership role in supporting the global low carbon transition and the UK Government’s ambitious plans for a strengthened industrial strategy and emissions reduction."
