Macquarie Capital scooped the coveted IJGlobal award for Sponsor of the Year for a second year on the trot having enjoyed an impressive flow of transactions across the full 2019 calendar year, closing deals in all corners of the world.

The value of this award is all the greater for it having been judged – as all IJ company awards are – by independent peers within the infrastructure community of many years standing, across the 4 teams that met in London, New York, Singapore and Dubai.

These teams – working in isolation from each other – vote on each category and the combined results lead to the ultimate award of the global prize. And they salute Macquarie’s acumen.

As one judge said of Macquarie: “This is an organisation that splits the audience. However, you cannot help but admire the success they have enjoyed – and 2019 was a hugely successful year for them.”

Macquarie was lauded by judges for having won “against serious competition” and on one of its deals, in particular, for being “genuinely innovative and ground-breaking”. A word that crops up repeatedly is “challenging”… not always referring to the deals they worked on!

This award winner has been active across the whole gamut of infra and energy sectors from transport and social projects through to offshore wind and other renewables projects. It has also innovated, in recent times building out capacity in the digital infrastructure space – data centres, fibre optics and broadband.

In Europe, London’s Silvertown Tunnel elicited comment from one (now retired) judge who had been involved in the deal with a rival bid. He said: “This was a challenging project beset by delays in the procurement. Macquarie rolled out an innovative financing package and well done to them for winning it against serious competition.”

The RiverLinx consortium – Macquarie Capital, Cintra, Aberdeen Standard Investments, BAM PPP PGGM, and SK E&C – reached financial close with Transport for London, allowing work to start on the largest UK road PPP for the last decade.

Meanwhile, at the other end of the planet, Taiwan’s Formosa 2 offshore wind farm was jointly bid by Macquarie's Green Investment Group and Swancor Renewable Energy, fielding a consortium of 20 international and local institutions to complete the project financing. The financing consortium comprised 6 local Taiwanese financial institutions and 14 international banks, supported by 4 ECAs, with local players providing around 30% of the project financing.

Back to Europe where Macquarie Capital led the acquisition of a fibre-to-the-home network from MasMovil, Spain's fourth largest telco, to create the nation's first independent wholesale-only FTTH network. This deal was described by one judge as “genuinely innovative and ground-breaking”, celebrating the hybrid structure as “challenging”. Macquarie Capital and its advisers had to draft all project agreements from scratch, develop and diligence a business plan and put in place a complex project finance structure.

Heading back to APAC, Macquarie's GIG completed the installation of Gray Whale Floating LiDARs in South Korea, the first such project marking the launch of the 1.4GW Ulsan offshore wind.

Overall, Macquarie was toasted by all 4 judging teams as a “first-class performer” with an “enviable track record of deals closed” in 2019… and, given they won this award last year as well, it seems only fair to salute its year-on-year success.

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