Announcements

August 22nd, 2007

Kelvin Power South Africa transaction complete

Aldwych International Ltd announced today that its wholly owned subsidiary, Aldwych Kelvin Holdings Limited, had completed the acquisition of a minority stake in the 600MW Kelvin Power coal-fired power station in Johannesburg, South Africa.  The other investors in the company are the Netherlands Development Finance Company (FMO), J&J Infrastructure Holdings (Pty) Ltd, Global African Power (Pty) Ltd and infrastructure funds managed by the Macquarie group, Old Mutual Investment Group (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd and Kagiso Trust Investments (Pty) Ltd.

Bernhard van Meeteren and Gerben Dijkstra, Investment Officers from FMO, remarked that “FMO is pleased to support Aldwych in this major project. FMO is further satisfied also that the acquisition is expected to result in a substantial improvement of the overall environmental and social performance of the Kelvin plant.”
Kelvin Power had been indirectly managed by Investec Bank Ltd and Nedbank Capital, the senior lenders to Kelvin, since early 2006 when the previous owner chose to relinquish its 95% equity holdings in the business.  Investec and Nedbank will remain senior lenders to the business after this new transaction.

Mike Meeser, Vice President of Investec, and Gerrit Kruyswijk, Vice President of Nedbank, both spoke confidently about the transaction and the future of the business by saying, “Today we feel vindicated in our actions over the last year, during which time we invested in people and in the business in order to find the right operator and investor for Kelvin.  We have confidence that this new investor group, along with Aldwych as the operator, has the skills and resources to make Kelvin the success that it should be.”

Aldwych Kelvin Operations (Proprietary) Limited (AKO), also a wholly owned subsidiary of the Aldwych group, will operate the plant under a long-term operations and maintenance (O&M) agreement.  The O&M agreement is rather novel for the industry in that it places a premium on AKO’s ability to effect a step change in the plant’s performance over the next several years, ramping its output up to levels more closely aligned with the plant’s potential.  Mark Fitzpatrick, Managing Director of Aldwych International, expressed his enthusiasm for the transaction and the challenge ahead. “Aldwych is eager to take on this challenge.  It is just the sort of thing with which several of us in Aldwych have a lot of experience.  Our General Manager, Steve Meyer, has set about recruiting an international management team, many of whom have done similar turn-arounds before.  Kelvin has so much potential; it’s just that it has been neglected for quite some time and the people have been demoralised by a lack of commitment on the part of the ownership.  We firmly believe that with the help of the existing staff, who are even more anxious than Aldwych to see a change at Kelvin, we can make this a superior operating power station in a timely manner.”

For further information please contact Lisa Cathery at +44 20 7634 9520, l.cathery@aldwych-international.com.