We are thrilled to unveil the Asia Pacific judging panel for the IJGlobal Awards 2024. This esteemed group comprises seasoned industry professionals with extensive expertise in infrastructure and energy financing throughout the region. They will determine the recipients of the company awards. 

These awards honour significant projects that reached financial close in the Asia Pacific region during the 2024 calendar year. They spotlight the organisations instrumental in delivering greenfield assets in the infrastructure and energy sectors, as well as those involved in refinance activities. 

It's important to note that the IJGlobal Awards differ from the IJInvestor Awards, which commend infrastructure fund activity and infra/energy M&A (Americas and Rest of World). They also stand separate to the IJGlobal ESG Awards. 

IJGlobal Awards stand out as the most transparent and peer-reviewed recognition in the industry. Regional teams of experts meticulously evaluate submissions and confidentially vote on the most outstanding organisations throughout the judging period. 

During Asia Pacific Judgment Day on 23 January (2025), our panel of judges will convene to deliberate on companies that closed deals in greenfield project finance and refinance activities throughout 2024. Winners will be disclosed on the awards night in Raffles, Singapore, on 9 April. 

To ensure fairness, judges abstain from voting in categories where conflicts of interest arise – for instance, lawyers refrain from voting on legal advisers, and bankers have no influence on the MLA category. 

To access the IJGlobal Awards 2024 submissions portal, click here... 

The judges for Asia Pacific Judgment Day are: 

• Audra Low – Clifford Capital 
• Fatima Al Suwaidi – Masdar 
• Suzanne Gaboury – ADB  
• Jean Monson – MUFG Bank
• Rakhi Anand – SMBC
• Rachel Chia – Deutsche Bank
• Petteri Härkki – AFRY 
• Ramakrishna Pataballa – BNP Paribas 
• Ganesh Padmanabhan – DBS Bank 
• Nick Carter – Akaysha Energy 
• Nathan Schmidt – Climate Fund Managers 
• Christopher Low – Macquarie Asset Management
• John Maxwell – Linklaters 
• Gregoire Bouzereau – HSBC 

Audra Low 

Clifford Capital 

Audra is group head of client coverage and chief executive officer at Clifford Capital Pte (CCPL).  

She joined the Temasek-backed specialist debt provider in 2012 as the head of origination and structuring. Since then, Audra has spearheaded the growth of the Clifford Capital franchise in project and asset finance. 

In her current role, she manages corporate and institutional client relationships, driving growth across various sectors. In addition, she also double-hats as the chief executive of CCPL. 

A repeat judge, she brings with her a wealth of experience working with Singapore-based companies on infrastructure projects locally and overseas. 

Prior to Clifford Capital, she spent 12 years in project finance with HSBC, playing a key role in the origination and financing of numerous award-winning projects in Southeast Asia, both as financial adviser and lead arranger. 

Fatima Almadhloum Alsuwaidi 

Masdar 

Fatima is the head of the development and investment department focusing on the Asian Pacific region. A new judge, she is leading Masdar’s business development activities in APAC and has been with the developer since 2016.  

Her recent roles included being the president director of Masdar Indonesia and during her time in Indonesia, Fatima led the Cirata Floating Solar Project team to a successful financial close which is the first IPP in Indonesia to be financed by commercial banks on an unlevered basis. 

A winner of numerous awards, Fatima also led and supervised the construction of the Cirata Floating Solar Project which is Southeast Asia's largest floating solar plant. She was based in Indonesia for 3 years.  

Fatima was also involved in the Masdar Eco-Bus; the first electric bus developed in the UAE and tailored to the country’s climate. She was seconded for 6 months in the US National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in Colorado, where she contributed to applied research in the fields of agrivoltaics, floating photovoltaic and electric mobility.

Suzanne Gaboury 

Asian Development Bank 

Suzanne is director general of ADB’s private sector operations department, a position she took over in January 2021. 

Before joining the multilateral, she was chief investment officer at FinDev Canada where she was responsible for strategic vision, including defining business markets, clients, product investment strategy, and development. 

Although a new judge, Suzanne has 28 years of professional experience spanning 85 developing and emerging economies.  

Her specialties include portfolio management, risk assessment across project finance and asset classes apart from deal origination, structuring and corporate governance. 

Suzanne has also worked at FMO, Canadian Investment Fund for Africa and Cordiant Capital.  

Jean Monson 

MUFG Bank 

Jean is a director of project finance and ESG finance for MUFG Bank’s Asia Pacific banking division.  

Based in Singapore, Jean joined MUFG in 2019 and focuses on the origination and execution of project finance lending and advisory in the renewable and infrastructure sectors, and ESG finance. 

Also a new judge, Jean is an experienced UK-qualified lawyer and investment banker, having advised clients in the UK and the Asia Pacific regions over the last 15 years.  

She has advised, originated and executed financing transactions in the international debt capital markets (both loans and bonds) and numerous award-winning transactions in project finance and ESG.  

At MUFG, Jean originated and acted as adviser on market leading transactions in the renewables and infrastructure sectors and ESG Finance.  

Prior to MUFG, Jean was a debt originator in Barclays Capital’s debt capital markets (DCM) team in London and Singapore.  

Before moving into investment banking, Jean started her career in London at Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer as a lawyer.  

Jean is a market leading thought leader in Renewables, infrastructure and ESG.  

Rakhi Anand 

SMBC 

Rakhi is an executive director and India business head for structured finance across Asia for SMBC. 

Based in Singapore, she has more than 20 years of work experience in the infrastructure financing and banking space. 

Also a new judge, Rakhi has worked extensively on transactions across the APAC region in energy and infrastructure.

Currently she leads the India business for structured finance at the Japanese lender, active across numerous sectors. 

Prior to joining SMBC in 2008, Rakhi has worked with SBI Capital Markets Ltd, and PwC in India. 

Rachel Chia

Deutsche Bank

A first time judge too, Rachel is a managing director, head of project finance, Asia Pacific for the German lender. Deutsche Bank’s PF rankings on the league tables have come up since late 2021 when Rachel came on board to lead the team in the region.

Rachel has more than 18 years of industry and project finance experience, especially in the renewables space, where she has led and closed more than 8GW of renewables transactions, and numerous PPP infrastructure transactions in APAC.

She is based in Singapore. Prior to joining Deutsche Bank, Rachel was a director with Norddeutsche Landesbank Girozentrale (Singapore) Structured Finance APAC team for 5.5 years and worked in the General Electric Company across United States, Singapore, China, UK, Canada in various finance positions for 9 years.

Petteri Härkki  

AFRY 

A repeat judge, Petteri is managing director for AFRY South East Asia, and the regional director for AFRY’s renewable energy and thermal power operations in Asia.  

AFRY has about 500 power sector consultants and engineers in Asia working in the renewables and traditional power sectors and is one of the leading technical consulting and engineering companies in the region.

Petteri has been working for AFRY since 1995, first in Europe, then in Singapore and for the past 24 years in Bangkok, Thailand. 

Petteri has been involved in numerous power plant projects in the roles of technical advisor, owners engineer and lenders engineer.  

He is responsible for AFRY’s technical consulting, engineering and environmental consulting activities in Asia for solar and wind power, battery storage, waste to energy, biomass to power, green hydrogen/ammonia, LNG import terminals and LNG/gas-fired power plants. 

During his 27 years in Asia, he has worked in most of the Asian countries and is very familiar with energy markets in the region. 

Ramakrishna Pataballa 

BNP Paribas 

Also a repeat judge, Ramki is managing director and head of project finance and advisory at BNP Paribas. 

Based in Singapore, he is member of the bank’s global Low Carbon Transition Group (LCTG), Ramki is also responsible for developing and implementing bank’s strategy in providing advisory and financing services for clients in power, oil and gas and infrastructure sectors in Asia, where the group focuses extensively on assisting clients in energy transition by investing in renewables and clean energy sectors. 

He has been with BNP Paribas for nearly 22 years and has worked on some marquee projects across the region. A trained engineer, Ramki started his banking career with ICICI Corporation where he spent 5 years before joining the French lender in April 2002. 

Ganesh Padmanabhan 

DBS Bank 

Another repeat judge, Ganesh is the managing director, head of the project finance institutional banking group in Singapore at DBS Bank. 

Ganesh has been with the Singapore-headquartered lender DBS Bank since 2014 in different leadership roles and has led the project finance team since 2023. 

He has more than 22 years of banking experience, having worked in advisory and arranging capacity on deals in the power, telecom, ports, and O&G sectors and across geographies. 

Ganesh is currently advising clients in project/structured finance for renewable energy (solar, onshore wind, battery storage, offshore wind and hydro), LNG-to-power, O&G midstream and transmission infrastructure projects in the Asia Pacific region. 

Prior to DBS, he worked at Standard Chartered. 

Nick Carter 

Akaysha Energy 

A new judge, Nick is the chief executive officer and managing director of BlackRock-backed Akaysha Energy, the largest BESS developer in Australia. 

He has more than 27 years of engineering and energy systems experience in Australia, Asia and North America. This includes roles such as: senior vice president at Macquarie Capital in the energy technology and solutions team within the Green Investment Group; business development and sales engineering at Tesla Energy for large front of the meter, commercial and industrial stationary storage and Virtual Power Plants (APAC); head of electric vehicle infrastructure and project development at AGL Energy; and technical engineering roles at General Motors and Toyota for advanced powertrain control systems. 

He was motivated to start Akaysha after not only seeing gaps in the market for a fully integrated development business focused primarily on innovative and rapid deployment of battery energy storage systems, but also seeing the opportunity created by the rapid renewable energy transition in Australia, across Asia and globally.  

At Akaysha, Nick leads a group of multi-domain experts and senior leaders across the 6 key pillars. In terms of the battery storage project development life cycle Nick is involved on a day-to-day basis across development, techno-economic optimisation, engineering, investment, project finance, asset management and energy trading.  

Akaysha also has operations in Japan and North America with active development projects in Texas and multiple regions across Japan. Akaysha has a global target of 15GW of BESS with a total capex deployed of $22 billion by 2030. 

Nathan Schmidt 

Climate Fund Managers 

Nathan, also a new judge, is head of Asia for Climate Fund Managers, responsible for the Asian investment portfolios of Climate Investor One and Climate Investor Two funds and CFM’s teams across Asia. 

He has 25 years of private equity and infrastructure advisory and investment experience. He sits on CFM’s investment committee for their global mandate with $2 billion of funds under management and is responsible for deploying and managing Asia’s allocation (about 40%). The investment mandate focuses on renewable energy, water infrastructure, sanitation and oceans in the Global South.

CFM is a leading blended finance fund manager. 

Since the first close of Climate Investor One in June 2017, Nathan and the team have developed and invested in numerous successful renewable energy platforms which have constructed more than 800MW of assets across 8 countries in South and South-East Asia.

These investments include Cleantech Solar, Ampyr Energy, GreenRoof and REV (Renewable Energy Vietnam). In addition, CFM has 3 waste-to-energy platforms and 3 bulk water supply and distribution platforms regionally which are in development, construction, and operation. 

Prior to joining CFM, Nathan was one of the founding members of Equis, investing in Asian renewables for its specialised private equity funds. His earlier roles were as an investment banker at Macquarie, in Seoul and New York focusing on brownfield M&A investment and advisory for broader infrastructure sectors, including thermal energy, transport, transmission, ports, sports and telecoms. His last role with Macquarie was head of acquisitions for Macquarie Korea Opportunities Fund. Nathan is originally from Australia and has been living and working in Asia for the last 19 years after 5 years in New York. 

Christopher Low 

Macquarie Asset Management 

A new judge, Chris joined Macquarie in 2006 and is currently co-head of Southeast Asia and India for Macquarie Asset Management (MAM), Real Assets.  

He has been based in Asia since 2011, initially based out of Hong Kong and subsequently, Singapore since 2014.  

In his time in Asia, Chris has led multiple notable transactions, across sectors including MAM’s investments in Energy Development Corporation in 2017 and Bersama Digital Infrastructure in 2022.  

John Maxwell 

Linklaters 

John is a partner and Asia head of energy and infrastructure at Linklaters, operating out of Singapore. 

He leads the law firm’s Asia energy and infrastructure team, which is recognised by clients and directories as one of the leaders in the market, in particular for low-carbon / renewables project development, project financing and sector M&A.  

He is recognised in Chambers (Band 1) and Legal 500 as a leader in his field, with clients and peers commenting that "he’s very commercial and brings senior-level advisory experience to a matter" and that he "has an outstanding reputation for project finance". 

Also, a new judge, John has been with Linklaters since 1994, when he started his legal career.  

Gregoire Bouzereau 

HSBC 

Greg is a managing director, head of infrastructure finance for Asia Pacific at HSBC, a position he has held since 2019. 

Also, a new judge, Greg is an HSBC veteran, having started his career with the lender in Paris in 2005. 

He brings more than 20 years of experience of financial advisory and arranging in a broad range of sectors including power, infrastructure and natural resources, in Europe and Asia-Pacific. Greg is currently advising a number of clients raising limited-recourse financing in Asia.

Greg was based in Singapore until 2019, where he was covering Southeast Asia. He was also previously based in Sydney until 2013 where he developed HSBC’s project finance franchise in the renewable power, infrastructure and oil and gas sectors

His team has led some marquee transactions across the region including award winning, Hai Long Offshore Wind Project in 2023, the largest offshore wind farm in Taiwan to date.