Adia grows property investments in Australia

DOWN UNDER: The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority is expanding its property portfolio in Australia. (Getty Images)

Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (Adia), the world's largest sovereign wealth fund, is expanding its property portfolio in Australia, UAE daily The National reported on Friday.

Adia's latest Australian foray was its purchase this week of an 819 million dirham ($223 million) stake in an office tower project in Sydney, the English-language daily quoted people familiar with the deal as saying.

The project, called Darling Walk, is part of a string of investments in Australia by Adia in the past year, the newspaper said.

It said that the fund already co-owns several office towers in Sydney and Brisbane in stakes worth several hundreds of millions of dirhams.

Darling Walk will include two nine-storey buildings with a total of about 58,000 square metres of office space as well as a retail, theatre and green space, it said.

Swollen by windfall oil revenues and foreign currency reserves, sovereign wealth funds hold assets of $1.9 trillion to $2.9 trillion, the US Treasury Department estimates.

Gulf-based funds such as Adia or the Kuwait Investment Authority have played key roles in capital-raising efforts by Western banks suffering from writedowns stemming from the credit crisis.

They have also stoked concerns that some Western countries could lose control over key industries.

The UAE is the world's fifth-largest oil exporter. Abu Dhabi, home to most of the country's reserves, has been using part of its oil revenues to diversify its economy and invest abroad. (Reuters)

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