Rerouting water from Brazil to quench a desert city's thirst

Lima

TO quench the thirst of the world's biggest desert city after Cairo, Peru's largest water company wants to tap international bond investors to help pay for a project to reroute water to the arid Pacific coast to serve Lima's 10 million citizens.

Sedapal, as the public utility is known, plans to tap the overseas bond market next year to help finance US$6.1 billion of projects, one of the country's largest investment portfolios, said chairman Rudecindo Vega in an interview at his office in Lima.

A fifth of Peruvian homes lack running water and President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, a former Wall Street banker, aims to close that gap in five years with US$14 billion of investments.

In Lima, about 8 per cent of the population live in homes with no drinking water or sanitation. Mr Vega said Mr Kuczynski's experience in finance and the water sector - he founded an organisation in the 2000s to build water supplies for the poor - will help Sedapal obtain the money it needs to build more dams, tunnels and p…