Puget Sound Energy (PSE), the utility of Bellevue, WA-based Puget Energy, will retain key local board members and utility management following completion of the deal to take the company private, it said Thursday.

The buyout consortium is being led by a North American unit of Australian-based Macquarie Bank Ltd. The deal, which was announced last October, is pending before the Washington Utilities and Transportation Commission (WUTC).

Stephen Reynolds will remain as PSE president and CEO, serving on both the utility and holding company boards, which will continue to be chaired by William Ayer, CEO of Alaska Air Group, who has served on the Puget boards since January 2005.

When the deal, valued at $7.4 billion, was announced it was estimated that federal and Washington state regulatory approvals of the merger would close by mid-year 2008 (see Daily GPI, Oct. 29, 2007). The proposed merger has gained approval from Puget shareholders and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), and Reynolds has indicated that the WUTC is scheduled to make a decision in September.

“When we announced the merger, we promised that under new ownership, our headquarters and operations would remain in Washington [state] and PSE would continue to be locally managed and run” Reynolds said. “That commitment included having a board member from the current boards serve on the new boards. Not only will we meet that commitment, the PSE board will, in fact, have three seasoned directors all firmly rooted in Washington.”

The investor consortium is led by Macquarie Infrastructure Partners, the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board and British Columbia Investment Management Corp., along with Alberta Investment Management Corp., Macquarie-FSS Infrastructure Trust and Macquarie Capital Group Ltd.

Seven other members on the Puget Energy and PSE boards will represent the six-member consortium of investors’ interests. Those persons would be announced following the merger’s final approval by the WUTC.

Ayer said he has a “keen interest” in making sure that “the decisions the current boards made in structuring the deal are carried out by the new boards as we make use of the access to billions of dollars in capital provided by the consortium.”

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