Fairway will plough Japanese investment in Multi Finance
Fairway Holdings, with main business interests in real estate, has bailed out Multi Finance PLC, a former Entrust Group Company that was in a bad financial state.
The aim is to start lease financing for its apartment business, a top Fairway official said. He added that they intend to bring in a Japanese investor to inject more funds into the company eventually.
“He’ll be a silent partner.” the official told the Business Times. Multi Finance PLC issued new shares by way of a private placement amounting to Rs. 550,875,005 to Fairway Holdings (Pvt) Ltd, and infused capital while boosting Multi Finance’s Capital Adequacy Ratio.
“They were less than Rs. 400 million in capital and by obtaining fresh shares we went into the company,” the official said.
Multi Finance, in an announcement to the CSE has said the company is of the view that the issue of shares to Fairway Holdings (Pvt) Ltd would capitalise them complying with the Finance Companies (Minimum Core Capital) direction No. 1 of 2011 and exploit the group synergies to develop its business model beyond contemporary financing.
Fairway Holdings develops luxury residential properties in Sri Lanka and has three luxury apartment projects – Fairway, Fairway Galle, Fairway Urban Homes and Latitude by Fairway.
It also has business in real estate management and property development, renewable energy projects, manufacturing and trading operations, provisioning of financial services, pharmaceuticals and most recently the travel and leisure industry, with a workforce of more than 650 employees.
Amongst its business interests, leisure (Fairway City Hotel and Go Outdoors), Aviation (F-air and Fairway Aviation Academy), trading (Centre Point and Asoka Glass), pharmaceuticals (Fair Health) bio technology (Fairway Biotech) and financial services (Lakderana Investments) stand out.
The official added that they will bring Lakderana as a fully owned subsidiary of Multi Finance, a new company with a moderate deposit base. Entrust was its parent company which was a part of the Ceylinco Group (at the time Ceylinco Sriram) which collapsed in 2008, and is being investigated by the CID and the Police over irregularities with the Central Bank (CB) carrying out its own probes. Entrust’s subsidiary Entrust Securities was taken over by the CB in January last year and its management given to the National Savings Bank after a sharp fall in its asset base putting depositors and investors at risk.