PrefBlog

Standard and Poor’s has announced:

• Atlantic Power Corp. has completed its acquisition of Capital Power Income L.P. (CPILP) and we have assigned Atlantic Power our corporate credit rating of ‘BB-‘ (see related research update).
• We are lowering CPILP’s and CPI Preferred Equity Ltd.’s rating to ‘BB-‘ to match the rating on their parent, Atlantic Power.
• At the same time, we are assigning a ‘5’ recovery rating to CPILP’s senior unsecured notes and a ‘4’ to Curtis Palmer LLC’s senior unsecured notes. We are lowering the issue rating for CPILP’s unsecured notes to ‘B+’ and the Curtis Palmer senior unsecured notes to ‘BB-‘.
• We are lowering the preferred shares of CPI Preferred equity ‘B-‘, which
  corresponds to a Canada scale rating of ‘P-4(low)’.

Standard & Poor’s Ratings Services said today it lowered the long-term corporate credit rating on Capital Power Income L.P. (CPILP) and CPI Preferred Equity Ltd. (CPIPE) to ‘BB-‘. This action follows the completion of Atlantic Power Corp.’s acquisition of CPILP
on Nov. 5, 2011. After the completion of the acquisition, we assigned our corporate rating of ‘BB-‘ to Atlantic Power. As CPILP and CPIPE are both wholly owned subsidiaries of Atlantic Power after the close of the
transaction, their long-term corporate credit ratings now match those of their corporate parent.
…
The outlook on the ratings is stable. We could revise the ratings if availability or generation is lower than expected, or if operation and maintenance costs are higher. In addition, the ratings could come under pressure from potential lower revenues from projects with recontracting exposure, as they represent about 56% of generation. Improved recovery prospects or material improvements in the risk profiles of several assets could result in higher ratings.

These issues were last mentioned on PrefBlog when they were downgraded to Pfd-4 by DBRS.

CZP.PR.A is a PerpetualDiscount; CZP.PR.B is a FixedReset. Both are relegated to the Scraps index on credit concerns.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 21st, 2011 at 8:47 pm and is filed under Issue Comments. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.