Mumbai :  IL&FS Infra Asset Management Limited (IAML), an Asset Management Company promoted by IL&FS Financial Services Limited (IFIN) to manage the IL&FS Infrastructure Debt Fund (IIDF), signed a Memorandum of Understanding with 8 public sector banks (Allahabad Bank, Bank of India, Canara Bank, Central Bank of India, Indian Bank, Indian Overseas Bank, Oriental Bank of Commerce and UCO Bank) for acquisition of infrastructure loans. The signing ceremony was attended by Dr Arvind Mayaram, Secretary – Economic Affairs and Mr. Rajiv Takru, Secretary – Banking apart from senior dignitaries of LIC, IL&FS and Banks.

Speaking on the occasion, Mr. Ravi Parthasarathy, Chairman-IL&FS Group said, “IIDF will complement domestic banks in providing required funding to infrastructure sector and would be integral part of the IL&FS Group’s efforts in taking India’s infrastructure growth story to the next level.” Mr. Ramesh Bawa Managing Director and CEO, IFIN further added, “We are targeting an initial corpus of approx USD 1.0 billion and hope to increase the overall corpus to USD 5.0 billion under management in the medium term.”

After the regulations for Infrastructure Debt Fund were announced by the Government last year, IFIN was amongst the first institutions to announce its intent to launch Infrastructure Debt Fund in partnership with Life Insurance Corporation of India. Its fund, IIDF was launched by Honorable Finance Minister P. Chidambaram on February 9, 2013 in Mumbai.

The formulation of final IDF regulations by SEBI sets the stage for launching the first set of schemes of the Fund. The first three schemes of Rs.5.00 billion each of IIDF have been assigned rating of ‘IND AAA idf-mf’ by India Ratings. The rating denotes the highest strength of the credit protection factors embedded in a fund’s investment policies and the quality of the sponsors / investment managers.