Standard Chartered Bank, Varde Partners, and Aditya Birla Special Situation Fund have jointly provided ₹800 crore of debt facility to GMR Airports for two years and eleven months, people with knowledge of the matter told ET.
With this, GMR Airports and two special purpose vehicles – GMR Goa International Airport and GMR Visakhapatnam International Airport – have jointly raised a little over ₹8,400 crore since November for capex and refinancing high-cost debt.
In the third week of December, GMR Airports, the holding company that operates Delhi, Hyderabad, and Goa airports, raised ₹800 crore in unsecured, listed, rated, non-convertible debentures (NCDs).
Standard Chartered Bank Singapore provided ₹400 crore, and Credit Solution India Trust, managed by Varde Partners, invested ₹300 crore, while Aditya Birla Special Situation Fund invested ₹100 crore in the non-convertible bonds.
GMR Airports offered a 13.275% coupon on the bonds, which included 5% as a cash coupon payable annually and 8.275% as a redemption premium, according to the bond document, which did not name the investors.
Standard Chartered Bank declined to comment, while GMR Airports and Varde did not respond to ET’s requests for comments, and Aditya Birla Group could not be reached for comments.
GMR Airports will use the proceeds of ₹800 crore to refinance its existing debt and toward investments into subsidiaries, joint ventures, associate companies or any other airport group company, according to the bond document.
GMR Airports had raised ₹1,950 crore NCDs for three years in the last week of November offering 13.275% for refinancing existing debt and capex, as reported by ET on November 27. Standard Chartered Bank, JP Morgan, Deutsche Bank, Varde Partners, and Trust Investment Advisors had invested in that bond issue.
GMR Airports had bullet payment of ₹1,406 crore due on December 28, 2023, according to the bond document. This includes ₹786 crore payment due to DB International (Asia) and ₹545 crore to Standard Chartered Bank (Singapore), among others. The funds were raised to repayments of those bonds, one of the persons cited above said.
The GMR Group has eight airport assets under operation or in various stages of development and another one for which it has won the bid.
Of these, Delhi, Hyderabad, Goa and Cebu in the Philippines are operational while Bhogapuram (Andhra Pradesh), Bidar (Karnataka), Crete (Greece) and Medan (Indonesia) are under development. It has won the bid for the Nagpur airport but is yet to be awarded the project.
In December, GMR Visakhapatnam International Airport raised ₹3,215 crore in term loans from a REC-led consortium for the construction of the airport, as reported by ET on December 18. Separately, GMR Goa International Airport raised ₹2,475 crore in the form of NCDs for refinancing its debt and capex.
