Good evening,

Palisade Investment Partners′ decision to throw its name and balance sheet behind ex-Whitehelm Capital deal maker Stephen Burns looks to be paying off.

Street Talk understands Burns’ Palisade Real Assets, a core-plus infrastructure investor with a penchant for biogas businesses, has secured a circa £200 million ($384 million) commitment from Dutch pensions heavyweight APG Asset Management, which oversees more than €569 billion ($922 billion).

APG’s investment would sit inside Palisade Real Assets’ UK-focused bioenergy fund dubbed BioticNRG, which is buying up waste-to-energy assets that can help decarbonise high-emissions sectors such as agriculture, heat and transportation.

In tandem with wooing APG as an investor, Palisade Real Assets’ BioticNRG platform has signed two acquisitions in the past fortnight. The first purchase, AD Aggregator Platform Limited (ADAP), adds six operating anaerobic digestion plants and a composting business in eastern UK.

The other, Material Change Limited (MCL), has been going since 2003 and will boost the Palisade platform’s in-house operational capability.

Those names – ADAP and MCL – are a mouthful, but the underlying businesses are similar to local LMS Energy, where Pacific Equity Partners last year paid $272 million to buy a 50 per cent stake after beating IFM Investors and Igneo Infrastructure Partners.

Burns spent 14 years at Whitehelm Capital as its head of Europe and Americas, and did shorter stints at Barings and NSW’s TCorp earlier in his career.

He hung out his shingle in 2021, after the older Palisade Investment Partners (the one that’s invested in things like North Queensland Gas Pipeline and Coffs Harbour airport) bought a minority stake in his Palisade Real Assets as well as Steve Gross and Jeremy Wernert’s Palisade Impact.

Read the full story tomorrow and more on the Street Talk page.

• Aqui vamos! One last chomp at Guzman y Gomez’s IPO prospectus disclosures before trading starts. Cue: interest income on cash.
• Four banks are underwriting a $7 billion stapled debt package for bidders gathered at the $15 billion-plus data centre AirTrunk.
• Proptech Archistar’s existing investors NAB Ventures, Skip Capital and PEXA have topped up in the latest round.

• In another data centre deal, Infratil launched a $1 billion equity raise to feed its CDC business via Barrenjoey, UBS and Goldman Sachs.
• Radiology businesses Integral Diagnostics and Capitol Health announced a $1 billion merger.
• And in a deal that no one saw coming, ETF maker Betashares sold a $300 million stake to Singapore’s Temasek.

At $2.2 billion IPO candidate Guzman y Gomez, the float’s $200 million cash proceeds are being applied to boost post-listing income. A seriously tasty burrito, when investors consider this changes an after-tax loss to an after-tax profit.

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