Three Covington Transactions in MENA Commended at IJGlobal Awards 2022

Three Covington Transactions in MENA Commended at IJGlobal Awards 2022

May 4, 2023

DUBAI—Three of Covington’s transactions in Saudi Arabia have been awarded Deal of the Year at the IJGlobal MENA Awards 2022. The infrastructure financings recognized span the power and water, utilities and technology industries, and follow Covington’s recognition by IJGlobal as the Middle East and North Africa Legal Advisor of the Year the previous year.

The three award-winning transactions include:

• Shuaibah 3 IWP, Saudi Arabia (Water - Power & Water - MENA)

Covington advised an ACWA Power-led consortium on a $632 million soft mini-perm to finance a conversion project deal to replace the old Shuaibah independent water and power plant located near Jeddah in the KSA with the Shuaibah-3 independent water project (IWP). The design project will have a capacity of 600,000 m³pd to be used by about two million people daily. The conversion project involved a technology switch from thermal multistage flash technology to reverse osmosis, which will reduce the power needed to desalinate seawater by 70%. Once completed, IWP will save up to 22 million barrels of light crude oil annually and avoid 45 million tonnes of annual carbon dioxide emissions.

The Covington team was led by Agnieszka Klich and included Ursula Owczarkowski and Jecolia Horn.

• Red Sea Multi-Utilities Project, Saudi Arabia (Utilities - MENA)

In one of the world’s most ambitious regenerative tourism projects to date, Covington advised a sponsor consortium led by ACWA Power in relation to the development and financing of the $1.5 billion Red Sea Gigacity Utilities Infrastructure Project in Saudi Arabia after the project’s developer, The Red Sea Development Company, appointed ACWA to design, build, operate and transfer the Red Sea Project’s utilities infrastructure. The project comprises eight different infrastructure systems that rely entirely on renewable energy for power generation, water production, wastewater treatment, waste management and district cooling. All of the utilities are being procured from the ACWA Power consortium under a single offtake arrangement, which is unique for a project of this kind.

The Covington team was led by Agnieszka Klich and Robin Mizrahi and included Ursula Owczarkowski, Laure Berthelot, Richard Oliver, Florence Cock and Jecolia Horn.

• Quantum Switch Tamasuk, Saudi Arabia (Digital Infrastructure - Data Centres - MENA)

Covington advised Quantum Switch Tamasuk on the structuring of an accordion financing to design, build and operate a portfolio of data centers across the Middle East, with the inaugural data center within the portfolio being the first of its kind to secure limited recourse financing in the Middle East. Once completed, the data center will serve as a new cloud region for a major technology company, which will allow companies and organizations in Saudi Arabia to achieve their digitalization objectives.

The core Covington team was led by Richard Keenan, with support from Marc Norman, Neisha Joseph, Rupert Harper, Ramy Ramadan, and Ingrid Rechtin.

The IJGlobal awards celebrate the “best-in-class transactions and organisations across the international infrastructure and energy sectors.” The winners are selected through a transparent peer-review process by leading industry experts.