Athens International Airport
Jorf Lasfar Power Station, Morocco
At the time of financial closing in September 1997, the Jorf Lasfar Power Station was the largest independent power project in Africa and the Middle East — a 1,356 megawatt, coal-fired facility on Morocco’s Atlantic coast, 130 kilometres south-west of Casablanca, with a total project cost of US$1.5 billion and a 30-year operating horizon.
The transaction was Morocco’s first independent power producer (IPP) project. The national utility, Office National de l’Électricité (ONE), had initiated an international competitive tender in 1994 to bring private sector operational expertise to the existing plant and to finance the construction of two additional generating units. The winning consortium — ABB Asea Brown Boveri and CMS Energy of the United States — formed a project company, Jorf Lasfar Energy Company (JLEC), which would operate all four units under a 30-year power purchase agreement, selling electricity exclusively to ONE.
The financing structure was a landmark in emerging-market project finance. With no sovereign credit rating and no established regulatory framework in Morocco, the deal required five multilateral and bilateral agencies to combine their risk coverage to bring commercial lenders to the table. The senior debt of roughly US$900 million was arranged by ABN AMRO, Banque Nationale de Paris, and Credit Suisse, with tranches guaranteed respectively by the World Bank (DM 313 million partial risk guarantee), SACE of Italy, the US Export-Import Bank, ERG of Switzerland, and a direct loan from OPIC. Equity contributions from ABB and CMS, together with surplus cash flow from the existing units, completed the financing.
Peter Hellmonds led ABB Germany’s role in structuring the transaction: designing the German special purpose vehicle structure — JLEC Capital GmbH and JLEC Power Ventures GmbH — securing the German federal investment protection guarantee (Investitionsgarantie) covering the full ABB equity stake of DM 300 million under the Germany-Morocco bilateral investment protection treaty, and coordinating across ABB entities in the United States, Switzerland, Italy, and Germany alongside the US operator CMS Energy.
Further Information:
World Bank Project Description as PDF