GE Energy Financial Services has paid $85 million for a 58 percent stake in Lightfoot Capital Partners, a New York City–based direct investor in energy businesses, assets and securities. 

A coalition of Canadian pension and institutional investors formed to pool their resources to create a customized infrastructure investment program, the Infrastructure Coalition LP, and the manager of the program, Aquila Infrastructure Management, have announced a C$105 million first close.

Natural gas pipeline company Kinder Morgan has agreed to acquire El Paso Corp. in a transaction that would create the United States’ largest natural gas pipeline company with an enterprise value of approximately $94 billion and 80,000 miles of pipelines.

Macquarie Capital Group and Barclays Integrated Infrastructure Fund have paid £105 million to acquire offshore wind assets in the Walney Offshore Windfarm.

An infrastructure fund focused on sub-Saharan Africa advised by Macquarie Infrastructure and Real Assets and South Africa’s Old Mutual Investment Group, has reached a final close on $500 million.

Taiwanese president Ma Ying-jeou has proposed a comprehensive public infrastructure construction plan for Taiwan that aims to advance the country’s infrastructure, fiscal health and financial services, as well as to build Taiwan into a regional air and marine transportation hub.

In many ways Brazil is no longer an emerging market — the country has emerged. There are flashes of the old Brazil in the form of its bureaucracy and a faint, lingering whiff of corruption as the country grapples with the challenge of preparing for the FIFA World Cup in 2014 and the 2016 Olympic Games, but there is little doubt that Brazil has arrived and that the environment for increased foreign infrastructure investment has reached a turning point.

Thirty-one states now have laws that allow for P3 procurement. Officials in the Commonwealth of Virginia have gone one step further and created the Office of Transportation Public-Private Partnerships to better pursue and manage these agreements. Tyson Freeman, Institutional Investing in Infrastructure assistant editor, spoke with Sean Connaughton, Secretary of Transportation for the Commonwealth of Virginia in the cabinet of Gov. Bob McDonnell about these initiatives. Connaughton oversees seven state agencies with more than 9,700 employees and combined annual budgets of $5 billion.

Spanish construction firm ACS has sold 50 percent of its stake in the I-595 toll road concession in Florida for an enterprise value of $588 million, according to a report by Reuters.