Macquarie's European Infrastructure Fund, MEIF Renewable Energy UK, has issued a £190 million (US$289.5 million) of debt in senior secured Notes maturing in 2020.

The proceeds of the notes will be used:

• to refinance existing project finance indebtedness of the company's biomass and landfill gas power generation subsidiaries; pay swap breakage costs and transaction fees;

• to fund a distribution of approximately £78 million to the shareholder MEIF Lux Renewables SARL, a Luxembourg-based holding company owned by the Macquarie group.

Moody's has assigned a provisional (P)Ba2 rating to the senior secured notes.

MEIF Renewable Energy UK Plc is the new parent company of two businesses, Energy Power Resources Limited (EPRL) and CLP Envirogas Limited (CLP), which own and operate, respectively, five biomass-fired power plants (which use poultry litter, straw and meat and bone meal as fuels) and 68 landfill gas generating engines across 25 sites in Great Britain and with a total installed capacity of around 174MW.

Of these facilities, the two largest biomass plants at Thetford, which has a total capacity og 38.5MW and Ely, which has a total capacity of 38MW, generated nearly 40% of group EBITDA in the year to 31 March 2014.