Knowledge Hub

Tokyo is rapidly becoming a regional hub for hyperscale deployments, as the xScale joint venture between Equinix and GIC nears first phase completion and development continues from the Digital Realty/Mitsubishi Corporation partnership on their latest site. These developments have...

COVID-19 Driving Growing Demand for Data

Despite the ongoing geopolitical uncertainties and COVID-19 outbreak, activity in the Hong Kong data center market has remained red hot. In one of the largest leasing transactions this year, US-based data center REIT Digital Realty announced in early July that it agreed to lease a newly completed purpose-built data center at 11 Kin Chueng Street in Kwai Chung as the operator’s second facility in the city.

The legal, tax and regulatory framework for investment funds is driven not just by the letter of the law but also by unwritten and commonly understood regulatory and tax customs. SEBI’s approach continues to move away from laissez-faire to one that is distinctively hands-on. For instance, SEBI prescribed the form of private placement memorandum to be used by alternative investment funds in early 2020. More recently, SEBI has prescribed minimum experience standards for key personnel and introduced statutory liabilities for investment committee members. The tax authorities, on the other hand, are becoming more aware of complex offshore fund structures and looking at innovative fund structures more carefully.

Whilst a majority of the global financial sponsors still choose to invest in India out of their flagship funds with limited or no specific allocation for India, there has been an increasing trend in the past few years to raise India focused pools of capital. These could be in the form of vanilla blind pools or quasi-fund structures such as investment platforms or managed accounts with financial sponsors (or increasingly with developers) investing in private equity, private debt, public equity and public debt.

This paper aims to assist global fund counsel and fund managers on India focused fund formation from a legal, tax, regulatory, commercial and strategic perspective.

On 30th April 2020, The National Development and Reform Commission and The Securities Regulatory Commission jointly released the "Regulations regarding the Launch of China Infrastructure Real Estate Investment Trust (REITs)". This announcement marks the beginning of C-REITs in the Chinese market.

Asia Pacific Real Estate Association (APREA) has been actively supporting the launch of REITs in China. APREA offers views and experience from International REITs markets to help craft a unique China REIT regulatory framework. In addition, APREA has been promoting REITs knowledge globally to increase awareness of REITs potential.

With this regard, APREA has invited key players in the REITs industry to share their thoughts on C-REITs potential. The China REITs Handbook" is an educational manual on China's REITs, to allow the public, industry personnel and investors to better understand China's REITs. Asia Pacific Real Estate Association together with King & Wood Mallesons (China), KPMG (China), Cushman & Wakefield (China), and Guanghua School of Management, Peking University have jointly produced this manual.