Bunge to close Climate Change Capital

Published 15:38 on April 12, 2015  /  Last updated at 16:15 on January 9, 2017  /  Bavardage, Kyoto Mechanisms

Trading house and agribusiness Bunge is to close Climate Change Capital three years after buying it, part of a wider shutdown of its asset management activities.

Trading house and agribusiness Bunge is to close Climate Change Capital three years after buying it, part of a wider shutdown of its asset management activities.

Bunge told the FT it would look for third party investment partners for its own industrial facilities in future and so no longer needed the London-based fund, carbon credits trader and advisory unit it bought for $9 million in 2012.

CCC was managing $148.4 million in assets last month, the FT said, citing US regulatory filings, but had been stripping down its activities over the past year.

Last month, CCC said it was spinning out a private equity group that managed a €200 million fund investing in resource efficiency in Europe, and last year it transferred its property portfolio to Impax Asset Management.

CCC chairman James Cameron has also said he will step down at the end of this month.

From 2002, CCC was one of the biggest investors in CDM projects, employing 150 people at the market’s height in 2009, but had shed more than half its workforce by the time of the sale.

The company made huge profits by investing in cheap industrial gas destruction projects in places such as China and India, but suffered as CER prices crashed from above €20 in 2009 to around €3 when Bunge bought it, well below the price CCC contracted to pay for many of the credits.

The company said it had advised or developed more than 300 emission reduction projects worldwide that are projected to save more than 100 million tonnes of CO2e over their lifetimes.

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