Milbank Advises on $3.5B Bond Offering by BlackRock's Green Palm Bidco S.à r.l.

Milbank LLP advised the dealers on the offering of $1.5 billion senior notes due 2041 and $2 billion senior notes due 2046 by Green Palm Bidco S.à r.l. (“Green Palm”) under its newly established $8 billion GMTN Programme. The proceeds from the issuance of notes, along with certain hedging proceeds, were used to repay a portion of Green Palm’s existing $7.8 billion bridge facility relating to its acquisition of a minority interest in Jafurah Midstream Gas Company, a subsidiary of Saudi Arabian Oil Company (“Saudi Aramco”). Concurrently with the issuance of the notes, Green Palm upsized its bridge facility for an aggregate amount of $13.1 million to be utilized for debt service.

Green Palm, owned by Global Infrastructure Partners, a part of BlackRock, acquired a 49% stake in Jafurah Midstream Gas Company, which has rights to tariff payments for the processing of certain products. Jafurah is the largest non-associated gas development in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, estimated to contain 229 trillion standard cubic feet of raw gas and 75 billion Stock Tank Barrels of condensate. It is a key component in Saudi Aramco’s plans to increase gas production capacity by 60% between 2021 and 2030 to meet rising demand.

The dealers included Citigroup, HSBC and J.P. Morgan as global coordinators and joint bookrunners, in addition to a syndicate of joint bookrunners and joint passive bookrunners.

The Milbank European Leveraged Finance/Capital Markets team was led by partners Trevor Truman and Apostolos Gkoutzinis and included associates Lefteris Dafermos, Facundo González Bustamante and Aryan Agrawal.

The Milbank Global Project, Energy and Infrastructure Finance team was led by partner Munib Hussain and included partner Seyda Duman and associates Walter Piazza, Artem Gorodilov and Rachel Tay.

“We continue to see very significant activity in the infrastructure-linked bond market,” said Mr. Hussain. “We certainly anticipate that there will continue to be very large bond offerings like this in the future, many in the Middle East and many used to refinance acquisition debt initially raised in the bank market.”