The Government of Turkmenistan, acting through the State Bank of Foreign Economic Affairs of Turkmenistan. The country has several of the world’s largest gas fields, including 10 with over 99 billion cubic meters of reserves located primarily in the Amu Darya basin in the southeast, the Murgab Basin, and the south Caspian basin in the west.

Turkmenistan’s economy is dominated by natural gas production and is reliant on the country’s ability to export natural gas. The energy sector, which is owned by the State of Turkmenistan, accounts for approximately 66% of the country’s GDP.

Acting through the State Concern Turkmengas, the Government signed a USD 3 billion engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) contract on a turnkey basis with a consortium comprising Korean and Japanese corporates to develop and set up an ethane cracker and  polyethylene and polypropylene plant near the Turkmenbashi area in Turkmenistan.

We acted as coordinating and structuring bank, book runner and mandated lead arranger. Despite the involvement of more than 20 cross regional banks, we successfully closed this largest debt financing in four months after the launch of general syndications, meeting a challenging timeline and demonstrating seamless execution.

The Turkmen government has ambitious plans to develop the petrochemical industry to produce more value added products. The successful closing of this ECA financing for the petrochemical complex is important to Turkmenistan to diversify its energy sector and develop its petrochemical industry. This will also establish the country as a regional exporter of petrochemicals with the products from the plant expected to export to Asia, Europe and Turkey.

This was a landmark transaction in the ECA market, presenting:

• one of the largest Korean and Japanese Export Credit Agency (ECA) financing transactions (excluding project finance) in 2014
• the first joint Korean and Japanese ECA financing in Turkmenistan
• the first Korean ECA transaction in Turkmenistan