MCH will manage the 200-million-euro fund of Cofides and Oman
Madrid, May 19th, 2018 – MCH will manage the 200 M€ fund created by the Spanish Development Financing Company (Cofides) and the Sultanate of Oman. This is the provisional result of the bidding process, made public yesterday afternoon in the Platform for Contracting of the Public Sector, after obtaining the best score among the candidates. The final decision will be made in the next few days once the period of consultations and allegations has elapsed. MCH is an advisor to four private equity funds, which jointly represent more than 850 million euros.
The new instrument will be endowed with 200 million euros and will be used to finance industrial deployments of Spanish companies in the Middle East. Of that amount, 100 million will be contributed by Cofides and another 100 by the sovereign fund of Oman. The contribution of Cofides is divided between 99 M€ from the Fund for Investments Abroad (FIEX), which manages this body, and another linked to its own funds.
The fund will serve to cover exclusively productive investments (those that generate employment and activity) so that those for financial purposes are discarded. Energy, health, water or chemistry are the most likely. Salvador Marín, president of Cofides, emphasizes that it will promote the constitution of temporary unions of companies of both countries. “It’s a financial fund that seeks to unite companies that do well there and in Spain.”
The commercial exchanges and the investments between both countries are very modest and the start-up of this fund could serve to revitalize them. A report from the Economic and Commercial Office of Muscat reveals that the entry of companies in the Oman market can open doors to other countries in the region and the opportunities provided for in the ninth five-year plan (2016-2020) focused on infrastructures of transport. “It is estimated that in the next 10 years Oman will spend up to 15,000 million dollars in this sector. However, the pace will be determined by the price of oil and its impact on the public budget. Likewise, the development of power and water plants and water distribution and treatment networks is planned, “the study emphasizes.
These same opportunities may arise in other countries in the region, such as Qatar, where the recovery in the price of oil has led to the recovery of investment plans that had been left in standby while waiting for the price of oil to improve. A delegation of Qatar Financial Center, the agency in charge of attracting investments to the country, was in Madrid at the end of April to try to attract banks and multinationals interested in the infrastructure plans planned for the next five years. The Middle East has become one of the main destinations for engineering and infrastructure companies. The Ministry of Economy estimates that at the end of last year Spanish companies participated in tenders worth about 160,000 million euros in the region.
Source: https://cincodias.elpais.com/
