State Bank of India said it intends to start a private equity fund of $1 billion to $1.5 billion for infrastructure financing with Australia’s Macquarie Group and World Bank’s private sector financing arm International Finance Corporation.
Saying there was “no point keeping funds idle”, SBI chairman OP Bhatt said the bank was awaiting regulatory clearance.
The three partners signed a joint venture agreement last month to give final shape to a memorandum of understanding signed in April this year. The original plan was to operationalise the fund, which will eventually have a corpus of $2 billion, by the end of the second quarter.
In recent weeks, players like Reliance Capital and LIC Housing Finance, which had planned PE funds, said that they would kick off operations with smaller funds because fund raising was not easy.(Business Standard)