Japan Bank for International Cooperation, the main overseas lender for Japan's government, will participate in the first stage of the debt financing of Woodside Petroleum's Pluto liquefied natural gas project on Australia's north-west shelf, Bloomberg reported.
Eight others bank along with JBIC will underwrite a loan of about $1 billion to Woodside, the news service reported.
The banks may sign the debt agreement with Woodside today, JBIC told
Bloomberg.
JBIC's website suggests the lender is a long-term provider of import finance to Japanese buyers of Australian copper exports, and, in principle, also a provider of import finance for LNG.
A quick review of JBIC records at its website suggests the lender has a handful of other assets under finance in Australia at present, including in coal, oil and forestry.
A related report by
MarketWatch (and derived from local print media) said that JBIC plans to lend roughly one billion yen (or close to A$10 billion) during the next five years to help fund the operations of Japanese companies investing in, or buying from, resource projects in Australia.
The escalating participation by JBIC may be one more measure of the impact of the credit crunch on the availability of finance.
In some ways Woodside's resort to this style of lender - which serves as both development bank and aid agency - is a throwback to an earlier era, when loans to natural resource projects needed a degree of government aid and strained to clear the commercial banking market.