The world’s biggest investor has paid $12.5 billion for significant stakes in some of Britain’s most important airports and ports.
BlackRock, the fund manager, is to buy Global Infrastructure Partners in a deal that will include Gatwick, the UK’s second-biggest airport. The agreement will make fortunes for the bankers and financiers who created GIP nearly two decades ago and will further BlackRock’s ambition to take on Macquarie, its Australian rival, in the global infrastructure market.
Global Infrastructure manages $100 billion of assets and its acquisition is the biggest deal in more than a decade for BlackRock, the world’s biggest money manager that oversees more than $10 trillion.
GIP is best known in the UK as the beneficiary of the enforced break-up in 2009 of BAA,