Fujian Refining & Petrochemical Company Limited (FREP), the joint venture formed by Sinopec, Fujian Province, and subsidiaries of Saudi Aramco and ExxonMobil in March 2007, executed recently loan documentation for the financing of the project with a lender group in Beijing. The joint venture is the first integrated refining and petrochemicals project with foreign participation in China. The lender group consists of eleven major PRC (Peoples Republic of China) banks plus Sinopec Finance Company, according to a report of Saudi Aramco's web-site. The groundbreaking ceremony for the Fujian Refining Ethylene Joint-Venture Project was held on July 8, 2005 in Quanzhou, Fujian. The debt facilities for FREP are arranged on a limited recourse basis, comprising both long term and working capital facilities in Renminbi and U.S. dollars. The facilities amount to about RMB30 billion yuan (or about US$4 billion), and represent the largest project financing to-date for a Sino-foreign joint venture in China. Tenor (or time-to-maturity) for the long term facilities will be 20 years for Renminbi and 15 years for U.S. dollars. The financing is secured following a competitive tendering process involving both Chinese and international banks.
