India’s Sovereign Fund Seeks Foreign Capital for Shadow Bank - Bloomberg

India’s Sovereign Fund Seeks Foreign Capital for Shadow Bank - Bloomberg:

India’s National Investment & Infrastructure Fund, which counts Singapore’s Temasek Holdings Pte. among its backers, plans to tap overseas investors to shore up the capital of its shadow banking unit.

The sovereign fund, which primarily invests in Indian companies that build power plants, airports and roads, will start providing long-tenure loans through its new shadow bank unit Aseem Infrastructure Finance Ltd., according to Sujoy Bose, its chief executive officer.

Aseem, which means “unlimited” or “infinite” in Hindi, has set a lending target of as much as 1 trillion rupees ($13 billion) to back greenfield and brownfield infrastructure projects in India, Bose said in a phone interview April 3. The lender has raised around 13 billion rupees so far and plans to seek about eight times more to beef up its balance sheet, he added.

“We will scale up the capital to 100 billion rupees over a period of time by tapping overseas institutional investors from Japan to Canada,” Bose said. “We want to create a classic project finance institution.”