A Nigerian acquires London Gatwick Airport

56-year-old Nigerian, Adebayo Ogunlesi is the new owner of the London Gatwick Airport in a deal worth £1.455 billion.

Ogunlesi is the current chairman and managing partner of Global Infrastructure Partners (GIP), an independent investment fund based in New York City with worldwide stake in infrastructure assets.

According to the report, Ogunlesi has presided over a great number of great deals will pay cash consideration of £1,455 million for the entire share capital of Gatwick Airport Limited on a cash-free, debt-free basis.  Ogunlesi says the acquisition of Gatwick is a landmark deal for GIP and adds another quality asset to his firm's rapidly expanding portfolio.

He previously worked with top-shelf New York law firm, Cravath, Swain & Moore before he moved to advise First Boston (which later acquired Credit Suisse in 1997 to form Credit Suisse First Boston or CSFB) on a hugely lucrative Nigerian gas project. At First Boston, he worked on project finance, brokering deals in which lenders finance assets like oil refineries and mines and are repaid with revenues generated by those enterprises and built CSFB's project-finance business into the world's best.

Ogunlesi attended the prestigious King's College, Lagos. He is a member of the District of Columbia Bar Association. He was a lecturer at Harvard Law School and the Yale School.

Ogunlesi, whose 86-year-old father was the first Nigerian-born medical professor, studied philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford and then earned law and business degrees from Harvard. In the US, he is known as the Nigerian who clerked for late Supreme Court justice, Thurgood Marshall, who they say was unable to pronounce his name and quickly dubbed him Obeedoogee. Colleagues and friends call him Bayo.