Westcoast Energy, a partner in more venturesome natural gasprojects, announced it has sold wholly-owned subsidiary Centra GasManitoba to Manitoba Hydro for $245 million.

“Large projects such as the Maritimes and Northeast Pipeline andAlliance Pipeline will consume a significant amount of capital,”Westcoast Chairman Michael Phelps said, advising the company has acapital spending budget in 1999 of $1.6 billion, “the largestcapital budget in the history of the company.” Sale of the LDC willhelp fund some of that.

“The opportunity presented to Westcoast Energy to realize fullvalue for the Centra Gas Manitoba asset at a sale price of some 20times earnings and 2.1 times book value led us to this decision,”Phelps said.

Centra Gas Manitoba is the primary distributor in the provincewith 6,500 kilometres of pipeline and secondary distribution linesdelivering about 63 Bcf annually.

With 240,000 customers it is a much smaller unit thanWestcoast’s largest distribution company, Union Gas of Ontario,which has over a million customers.

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