Athens International Airport
In the mid-1990s, the Greek government and a consortium led by the German construction firm Hochtief set out to build a new international airport at Spata, 25 kilometres east of Athens, to replace the hopelessly overcrowded Hellenikon airport. The result — Eleftherios Venizelos International Airport — was named the European Infrastructure Deal of the Year 1995 by Privatisation International and recognised as the first major cross-border airport financing ever executed within the European Union. It was also, at the time of its signing in June 1996, the world’s first privately financed Build-Own-Operate-Transfer airport project.
The transaction was structured as a 30-year BOOT concession, with the Hellenic Republic holding a 55% stake in the airport operating company and the Hochtief-led consortium holding the remaining 45%. Total project costs amounted to DM 4.125 billion, with the construction contract alone valued at DM 3.259 billion. The financing package combined European Investment Bank senior debt, a commercial bank facility guaranteed by Hermes — the German federal export credit agency — EU Cohesion Fund grants, and equity from the consortium sponsors. The airport was designed for an initial capacity of 16 million passengers per year across two independent parallel runways, with phased expandability to 50 million.
Within the Hochtief consortium, ABB led an internal sub-consortium covering ABB Calor Emag Schaltanlagen AG for electrical engineering works and H. Krantz-TKT GmbH for mechanical engineering works — together representing close to nine percent of the total transaction value. Peter Hellmonds was the sole finance professional responsible for both entities. The Hermes export credit guarantee covered ABB’s and Krantz-TKT’s equipment supply — Germany’s exported contribution to the project — while Hochtief’s civil works, executed predominantly by Greek contractors, lay outside its scope. The concession agreement was signed in Athens on 11 June 1996.
Eleftherios Venizelos opened in March 2001 and has since become the principal aviation gateway for southeastern Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean. It continues to serve tens of millions of passengers each year.
Infrastructure Yearbook 1996 as PDF
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