John Laing offers to pay £1 bn for Balfour Beatty's public-private partnership assets

London-listed John Laing Infrastructure Fund (JLIF) today offered to pay £1 billion ($1.6 billion) to buy the public-private partnership assets of crisis-hit construction company Balfour Beatty.

JLIF said in a statement that it had made a non-binding proposal, subject to due diligence, to buy Balfour Beatty's portfolio of public-private partnership investments. JLIF, based in London, added that it ''would seek to finance the acquisition largely through the sale of new shares.

Balfour Beatty, UK's largest construction firm, has been struggling due to lack of demand as well as problems in completing projects on time due to spiralling costs.

Although it has a turnover of £8.5 billion, the company's stock price has fallen by more than a third this year. Its current market cap is around £1.26 billion.

Balfour Beatty had in September sold its US-based engineering and construction consulting arm Parsons Brinckerhoff to Canadian company WSP Global for £820 million. (See: Balfour Beatty sells Parsons Brinckerhoff for £820 mn)

Parsons Brinckerhoff was in part responsible for the collapse of the US construction services giant Carillion's £3-billion merger with its British rival.

Earlier this year, Carillion made three bids, the last amounting £2.1 billion, to acquire Balfour, before abandoning it in August.

Parsons had emerged as a battleground for the two companies as Carillion said it needed Balfour to keep Parsons and its stable cash flow - one third of Balfour's earnings came from the business - to cover the merger restructuring costs.

JLIF is one of Europe's largest listed infrastructure funds, and invests mainly in hospitals, schools and road projects in the UK, Europe and North America.