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Adani taps Morgan Stanley to help sell Abbot port stake in Australia

India's Adani has appointed Morgan Stanley to advise on the possible sale of a stake in its Abbot Point coal port in Australia, as it looks to raise funds to help finance a AUD 7 billion mine, rail and port project.

Mr Andrew Porter, Adani spokesman, said that the company has hired Morgan Stanley to help it on a potential partial sale of Abbot Point, a 50 million tonnes a year coal terminal on the east coast of Australia that it bought for USD 2 billion in 2011.

Mr Porter said that funds raised from the stake sale would be used to help finance Adani's planned expansion of the port.

Earlier this year, Morgan Stanley advised the Australian state of New South Wales on the sale of the Port of Newcastle, the world's largest coal export terminal, which fetched AUD 1.75 billion, double the amount that had been widely expected.

Adani's comments came after the Wall Street Journal reported that while Morgan Stanley was advising on the port sale, the bank was among four major US investment banks that had told a US based green group, Rainforest Action Network, that they would not help fund the port's expansion.

The east coast port expansion to handle two rival coal projects planned by Adani and India's GVK with Australian billionaire Ms Gina Rinehart has sparked an outcry from green groups and tourist operators opposed to coal projects and port dredging near the World Heritage-listed Great Barrier Reef.

The USD 17 billion worth of projects in the undeveloped Galilee Basin have been at the center of a campaign by anti-coal activists pressing institutional investors and big banks to shun coal investments to help combat climate change.

Mr Amanda Starbuck, a director at San Francisco-based Rainforest Action Network, said that "Stopping Abbot Point is a top priority for us, because this single project is the key to whether one of the largest stores of carbon on the planet, the Galilee Basin, stays in the ground where it belongs, or is sold on the global market and released into our atmosphere."

Morgan Stanley said that it was not necessarily opposed to the Abbot Point expansion, but it typically does not provide financing for any projects in Australia.

Source: Reuters