TPG has hired a hefty five-strong broker syndicate to prepare Alinta Energy for the listed markets.

Street Talk can reveal TPG has mandated Goldman Sachs, Macquarie Capital and UBS to run the float as global coordinators, while Credit Suisse and Morgan Stanley have also been hired as joint lead managers.

The group were appointed on Wednesday night by shareholder and private equity giant TPG and will start exploring an initial public offering this half. 

It's understood Alinta's chosen banks pitched around three key themes. These included the Jeff Dimery-run company's superior cashflow conversion compared to AGL, which enables the company to fund its strong growth pipeline and pay a 5.5 per cent to 6.5 per cent dividend; its lack of exposure to coal; and the fact almost half its earnings come from long-term contracted assets, while the rest comes from the stable Western Australian retail gas business. 

The clean energy theme will play into the pitch to fund managers. While AGL has the largest coal fired generation fleet in the country and will not exit coal until 2050, Alinta closed its only coal fired power station earlier this year.

The appointments come as Alinta's owners get serious about the IPO path, having failed to sell the company to strategic buyers including AGL Energy. 

TPG, which speaks for the bulk of the shareholder group, received written pitches from banks last week, as revealed by Street Talk, and interviewed utilities bankers and equity capital markets teams in Melbourne. 

Alinta makes about $400 million in annual earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation, with its owners understood to be seeking about $4 billion for the business.

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Barely a week before Woolworths is due to report its first loss as a listed company, thanks to massive write-downs on home improvement, BIG W and unwanted supermarkets, chief executive Brad Banducci is flying out to the US on Thursday.

Unless he's calling on former Woolworths executive Greg Foran, who now runs Walmart's US operations, the trip is believed to be related to the imminent sale of Woolworths' home improvement business.

Banducci is either heading to New York, the home of private equity company Blackstone Group, which is keen to take 60-odd Masters stores off Woolworths' hands, or he's off to Mooresville, North Carolina, to attempt  to come to an agreement with joint venture partner Lowe's on the value of the business.

Woolworths and Lowe's have been in negotiations since January, when Lowe's exercised an option to sell its 33 per cent stake in the $3.3 billion joint venture to Woolworths, prompting chairman Gordon Cairns to pull the plug.

Lowe's, which reported quarterly sales overnight, wrote down the value of its stake by $737 million or more than 50 per cent in February, but the pair have been unable to agree on the price Woolworths should pay for Lowe's stake, despite the involvement of three independent experts.

Armed with bids from Blackstone, Charter Hall, a group of private investors, Metcash's Mitre 10 and Anchorage Capital Partners (for the Home Timber and Hardware business), Banducci must be hoping to convince Lowe's to agree on a price so the process can come to a close.

Final bids for Masters and Home were due last month and Woolworths is keen to announce a deal at the full year results on August 25, closing a door on the worst chapter in the company's 92 year history.

Elsewhere, Goldman Sachs has appointed bankers Marissa Freund and Olivia Brown as co-COOs of the M&A group for Goldman Sachs in Australia and New Zealand.

The appointments were announced internally by Goldman's head of M&A, Nick Sims, and investment banking boss Christian Johnston. 

 

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Nobody said it was easy. No one ever said it would be this hard

Oh, take me back to the start. 

And with Coldplay's words ringing around the market, it looks like it is back to the start for everyone involved in the sale of NSW's largest electricity networks company, Ausgrid. 

Street Talk understands that NSW has been advised to re-run the auction, after failing to secure a bid that passed muster with the Foreign Investment Review Board, the Federal Treasurer and underlying Australian intelligence agencies. 

While no one was talking definitives on Wednesday night, after much soul-searching, sources said Ausgrid was likely to be re-offered to infrastructure, financial and utilities investors around the world, albeit with more clearly defined rules around foreign ownership and data and network security. 

The key will be to structure the sale to entice Australia's biggest homegrown infrastructure investors, including managers like IFM Investors and QIC, and offshore financial investors happy to take minority and non-controlling stakes in Australian utilities, such as the Canadian pension funds.

Sources said any one foreign investor was likely to be restricted to 20 per cent of Ausgrid (or 40 per cent of the up-for-grabs stake). 

It would mean Ausgrid's two existing bidders - Hong Kong's Cheung Kong Infrastructure and State Grid Corporation of China - had finally been felled, 3½ weeks after lodging their respective offers. The pair then had one week to overcome national security issues raised by Treasurer Scott Morrison, and there has been plenty of maneuvering in an effort to revive their chances. 

The bidders have reached out to Australia's infrastructure investors, testing appetite for various co-investment deal structures.

However, sources in the local infrastructure community expressed their preference that the auction be re-run, so they can have the four months or so required to run due diligence on the power network and line up funding for any tilt. 

Should the auction be re-run, it would be hard to get more than two bidding groups to vie for the asset, given the $6 billion-odd equity cheque likely to be required to win the auction. It would be a similar situation to the Port of Melbourne, where IFM and QIC are spearheading two bidding groups, which also include other local and offshore financial investors. 

The other question is what it means for Ausgrid's smaller sister company, Endeavour Energy, whose auction was expected to get underway this quarter. But expectations have changed greatly in the past fortnight and Endeavour is likely to have to wait another six-months or so. 

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Here's a sweet deal if ever we heard it.

Australia's largest commercial mango orchards have been put up for sale by fresh produce company One Harvest almost a year after the marketing rights for the popular Calypso mango variety were sold to a company backed by the Smorgon family.

The flyer for the deal, which was sent to prospective investors this week, says four mango orchards covering 1,311 hectares are on the block. The orchards, which are located in the prime mango growing region in the Northern Territory and produce 40 per cent of the annual total domestic Calypso Mango supply, are leased to a grower until 2026, with guaranteed income of more than $1.5 million, plus annual increases of at least 2.5 per cent.

The orchards exported about 715,000 kilograms of mangoes in the 2016 financial year to New Zealand, Singapore, Hong Kong, the US, the Middle East and Malaysia. Industry sources reckon a sale price of about $20 million is achievable. 

One Harvest is divesting the orchards to focus on its fresh cuts salad and vegetable business, sources said. 

The PPB Advisory-run sale process follows the sale of the exclusive marketing rights to Calypso mangoes in October 2015 to Perfection Fresh, which is backed by Melbourne's Victor Smorgon Group. That company already owns the marketing rights to several mango varieties. 

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One of the world's largest pension funds, the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, is setting up shop in Sydney so it can keep a closer eye on its $8 billion Australian portfolio.

CPPIB will open its first Australian office in Sydney over the next 12 months. Although CPPIB has had an informal presence in Australia since it acquired tollroad group Intoll in 2010, snagging a stake in Sydney's Westlink M7, it has not had a dedicated local team supporting its infrastructure and property investments.

The move comes as CPPIB, which manages some C$287 billion of assets globally, prepares to take over ownership of Pacific National's rail haulage business next week as part of a consortium that has acquired the rail group from Asciano.

CPPIB has the biggest financial stake in the five-member consortium of international funds that will run Pacific National with a share of around one-third. Global Infrastructure Partners controls 27 per cent.

The establishment of a formal Australian office is expected to help CPPIB better manage other current investments such as its $525 million interest in Sydney's new NorthConnex motorway, which is under construction, and its 50 per cent stake in two of the three office towers at Sydney's new Barangaroo South development.

CPPIB has also this year acquired 40 per cent of agricultural trader Glencore Agricultural Products from UK-listed miner Glencore. 

The agricultural group is one of the largest buyers of grains, oilseeds and cotton in Australia and owns some 24,000 hectares of land.

CPPIB's former chief executive, Mark Wiseman – who left the fund this year to join BlackRock and has been replaced by Mark Machin – has previously described Australia as an "extremely attractive destination" for investment.

The Canadian group has not revealed how many people will be based in Sydney – or who will run the office – but it is expected to remain a small team.

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