This column has championed infrastructure funds such as 3i’s for years now as offering an assured income not easily available elsewhere. Yesterday’s economic data and decision by the Bank of England to hold base rates yet again does nothing to make such investments any less attractive.
It is appropriate, then, that last June 3i Infrastructure should have carried out the biggest capital raising the quoted infrastructure sector has seen since the company floated in 2007, a total of £385 million, and seen it heftily oversubscribed.
Encouragingly, the fund managed to spend the money by the end of the year. Two investments were pending at the time of the cash raising, in Wireless Infrastructure Group, which puts up phone masts, and TCR, a Belgian provider of