The Gelephu Mindfulness City must prioritise financially viable and bankable projects to secure investments. According to its Board Director, Yee Ean Pang, mobilising funds is crucial to realising the vision of Gelephu as a business hub. Speaking at a recent forum in the capital, the board director said that the city would adopt a “four-plus-one” funding model to attract investments.
The city’s Board Director Yee Ean Pang brings extensive experience in launching new projects and infrastructure development across Asia, managing a six billion US dollar investment portfolio.
Explaining the “four-plus-one” financing model, he said that the first and most crucial step is for the city to secure its own funding.
Yee Ean Pang, Board Director of Gelephu Mindfulness City “We have to put money on the table to mobilise other people’s money. We must have skin in the game. We are lucky to have some level of resources right now in our kitty. And we are going to use that very wisely to mobilise other people’s money to help us.”
According to the director, the second funding channel involves innovative schemes such as the Gelephu Investment Development Corporation’s nation-building bonds, aiming to raise 100 million US dollars.
Additionally, a Founding Members programme has been launched as an exclusive initiative to engage key experts in advising and investing in the city’s development.
The first Founding Member, Ming Z. Mei, Co-Founder and CEO of Global Logistics Properties or GLP, was recently introduced. GLP is a global leader in logistics real estate, data centres, renewable energy infrastructure, and related technologies
Yee Ean Pang said “The third channel very importantly is the projects. The projects themselves has to raise the equity as well as the loans to bring in investments. These are situations where we together with our partners overseas or locally, private ones, to take over some of these projects, to fund some of these projects. Get our banks going, get our foreign banks to come in to lend to us.”
He added that achieving this requires projects to be bankable and financially viable.
“So, as part of this, we have been identifying schemes. For example, certain commercial area we will set aside for other developers to take over as master developer and they take it off from there. So, we develop that infrastructure and they continue from there investing in other hardware.”
The fourth funding channel will rely on grants and loans from multilateral partners such as the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank.
Regarding the “plus-one,” the board director said that the city is a long-term project where all initial investments must generate returns to ensure its sustainability.
Meanwhile, CEO Mun Leong Liew said that it is important to present a compelling idea to attract investors and drive economic development.
“It is not just the size of the country, but is the people in the country and the vision of the leaders, trustworthy leaders that bring you forward. I think that is so important to me that we have an idea envisioned by His Majesty. I think it is a viable idea. I am convinced of it.”
His Majesty The King in his address to the nation during the National Day said that the world is looking for new ideas and better options and that some of the largest problems can be solved by a single, good idea – and sometimes that idea can come from a small country.
Sherub Dorji
