Global Infrastructure Partners

The remaining council members are seeking legal means to remove her.

In southwest Ohio, the parent company, which owns the Dayton area's most prominent electricity provider, is being purchased by a foreign group called Global Infrastructure Partners.

ONN's Jared Allen reports.

AES Ohio has been approved for sale by the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio.

Basically, Savi is combining with Group of Mexico's own electricity assets.

GIP, Global Infrastructure Partners, which is now part of BlackRock, the world's largest asset manager, will keep 30%.

The combined business, I think, will have four and a half gigawatts of generation capacity.

And Groupamico, as well as giving its assets to the combined entity to get the 70%, is putting in $880 million in cash or so.

These were consortiums of the energy banker, the project finance banker, the transport banker, the muni bond banker, all just trying to manufacture some momentum and fill a gap in the product suite.

But it wasn't that long until those early ragtag-looking entrants were soon overwhelmed by the scaling of Brookfield, Global Infrastructure Partners, which was founded by ex-Credit Suisse bankers, and now of course, is part of BlackRock.

Macquarie's new US business was entering around this time.

KKR was in the late two thousands.

Let's go build something really, really special." [upbeat music]

So in the last couple years, BlackRock has again continued to reinvent itself, expanding into alternative assets with the acquisitions of the infrastructure investment fund GIP, and last year our firm, HPS.

Talk to our listeners about the strategic logic of this next phase of BlackRock's evolution and the importance of alts to the overall BlackRock strategy.

So alts is a, is a terrible term.

We were in the business, but we're doing $500 million transactions.

They could do multi-billion dollar transactions.

So listening to what the client needs, thinking this is the right thing for our type of clients, and that's why we went after, uh, GIP.

And so far it's been an incredible success and a lot of fun as well.

You obviously saw Fernando Chico buying a slug of Banamex from Citi, a group of makers you mentioned earlier.

mostly buying from Savvy, buying Savvy from BlackRock or from GIP.

So you've seen quite a lot of Do you think the foreigners selling because they're nervous about USMCA not happening because they're nervous about judicial reform? Do you see Mexicans buying because they're not really worried about those issues? What makes this trend of big Mexican companies, Mexican billionaires buying and US and European companies often selling?

Well, most if not all of the examples that you gave were opportunistic transactions.

You're now going across several markets.

Do we ever see an opportunity where if you look at GIP and you look at EQT, where in Toyota, for example, where they say, okay, Frank, there's an opportunity to enter the fleet management business.

Is that something that could ever emerge in the future?

I guess I'll say three things.

If you've flown into a major hub airport and needed anything beyond a self-serve pump, there is a reasonable chance Atlantic has been involved in that transaction.

Their main competitor at the national scale is Signature Aviation, which itself went through a significant ownership transition several years ago when Blackstone and Global Infrastructure Partners completed a takeover that moved Signature off the public markets and into private equity hands.

Signature and Atlantic between them represent a substantial share of FBO capacity at the busiest airports in the country, and now both of those major players are operating under institutional private equity ownership.

That structural shift is the thing worth paying attention to.

Last month, state regulators approved a $6.2 billion buyout of Elite, the parent company of Minnesota Power, the state's main power utility.

The buyers? Global Infrastructure Partners, which is owned by BlackRock, together with Canada's pension fund.

A public utility that hundreds of thousands of Minnesotans rely on is shifting into the hands of private capital.

Critics, like one administrative law judge who advised the acquisition be stopped because it's not in the public interest, warn that buyers are paying a big premium over the utility's actual worth here, potentially hundreds of millions above market value.