East Timor

East Timor

Postby winston » Sat Oct 22, 2011 4:44 pm

East Timor mulls Temasek-style investment firm

East Timor is mulling an investment firm based on Singapore's Temasek Holdings, to invest part of the country's billions of dollars in petroleum revenues, President Jose Ramos-Horta said Friday.

He said East Timor can use the money not only to build roads and other infrastructure but also to buy strategic assets overseas in such sectors as telecommunications, property and renewable energy.

New legislation now allows the government to invest 50 percent of the country's Petroleum Fund into domestic infrastructure and a diversified asset portfolio abroad, up from only 10 percent previously.

The other 50 percent is invested in US Treasury bonds.

East Timor's Petroleum Fund has been growing at an average 10 percent over the past decade and is expected to reach nearly $9.0 billion in December, the president told the Foreign Correspondents Association in Singapore.

"We are looking into some model like Temasek," he said.

"Our minister of finance has been investigating these experiences (of Temasek) to see how we can... invest domestically and internationally."

Temasek is one of two state-linked Singapore investment companies that has stakes in companies locally and overseas, including Singapore Airlines and other firms in telecoms, finance and real estate, among others.

"The first priority is to invest the money in infrastructure development in the country," Ramos-Horta said.

He cited a planned $600 million dollar project to redevelop the existing airport in Dili by extending the runway and building a new terminal.

Part of the Petroleum Fund could also be invested in "sovereign debt or in strategic assets (and) that can be anywhere from China to India to Europe -- whether in telecoms or renewable energy," he said.

Resource-rich East Timor won formal independence in 2002, three years after a UN-backed referendum that saw an overwhelming vote to break away from Indonesia, whose 24-year occupation cost an estimated 200,000 lives.

Source: AFP Asian Edition
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