Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. It is now 10:30 and time to begin our annual and special meeting of shareholders, Brookfield Asset Management. My name is Frank McKenna, and as Chair of the Board, it's my pleasure to welcome you to today's meeting. On behalf of the board management, I'd like to extend a warm welcome to everyone who is here today, including those who are joining us through webcast. I will now call the meeting to order and ask CST Trust Company by its representatives, Tony DeCrescenzo and Kay Harrison, to act as scrutineers. I will also require our Corporate Secretary, A.J. Silber, to act as secretary of today's meeting. It's now my pleasure to introduce the members of management on the stage who will be participating with me in today's meeting, Bruce Flatt, our Chief Executive Officer, and Brian Lawson, our Chief Financial Officer.
As outlined in the management information circular, there are five items of business to be considered today. First, to receive the consolidated financial statements of the corporation for the fiscal year ended December 31st in 2015. Secondly, to elect directors who will serve until the next annual general meeting. Third, to appoint the external auditor and authorize the directors to set their remuneration. Fourth, to consider an advisory resolution on the corporation's approach to executive compensation. Fifth, to consider a resolution approving the adoption of a new management share option plan. In connection with the business of the meeting that we're going to deal with today, unless a shareholder or proxy holder demands a ballot, all voting will be conducted by a show of hands. In order to expedite the formal part of today's meeting, I've asked certain shareholders to move and second various resolutions.
Although the procedure will assist in the handling of formal matters, it's not intended to discourage anyone from speaking in reference to any resolution after it has been proposed and seconded. As always, there will be time reserved afterwards for question and answer. I'm advised that the notice calling this meeting and the management information circular were disseminated to voting shareholders in accordance with all applicable laws. I've asked the secretary to keep a proof of the notice, and proof of mailing within the minutes of the meeting. The minutes of last year's meeting of shareholders held on May the 6th of 2015 are also available should any shareholder wish to review them. Based upon the scrutineer's preliminary report and attendance, the secretary has confirmed that there is a quorum present.
I therefore declare that the meeting is properly constituted for the transaction of business for which it has been called. Turning to the first item of formal business, I will now table the corporation's 2015 annual report to shareholders, which includes the corporation's consolidated financial statements for the fiscal year ended December 31st, together with the external auditor's report. Copies of our annual report have been mailed to shareholders who have requested the report and are also available here today. The second item of business at our meeting today is to elect directors who will serve until our next annual meeting of shareholders. Before I introduce the nominees, I want to first note that we had one director this past year, Lance Liebman, who decided to retire after 10 years on the board.
I want to take this opportunity to thank Lance for his service on behalf of shareholders. He was a superb director, and he was also the longtime chair of our Management Resources and Compensation Committee. It is now my pleasure to introduce the 16 director nominees standing for election this year. To assist you in identifying our directors, their pictures will be shown on the screen as I read their names. The eight proposed nominees for election by holders of the corporation's Class A limited voting shares are Elyse Allan, Angela Braly, Marcel Coutu, Youssef Nasr, Seek Ngee Huat, Diana Taylor, and myself. The eight nominees for election by the holders of the corporation's Class B limited voting shares are Jeffrey Blidner, Jack Cockwell, Bruce Flatt, Robert Harding, David Kerr, Phil Lind, Lord Gus O'Donnell, and George Taylor.
Fifteen of the proposed nominees were elected at our last annual meeting in May of 2015 and are standing for re-election today. We are also delighted to have Elyse Allan standing for election for the first time this year. As noted in your information circular, Elyse is the president and the CEO of GE Canada and has been a magnificent addition to our board. Information on all 16 director nominees is set out in our management information circular, which was posted on our website for shareholder review and available from the company upon request. The meeting is now declared open to receive nominations for the election of the proposed directors.
Mr. Chair, I nominate for election as directors the eight nominees for the Class A limited voting shareholders and the eight nominees for the Class B limited voting shareholders named in the management information circular dated May 2nd, 2016.
Thank you, Carly.
Mr. Chair, I second the motion.
Thank you. Thank you, Ramy. Are there any further nominations? Are there any further nominations? Are there any further nominations? If not, I declare the nominations closed. As there are 16 directors to be elected and the same number of nominees, I now declare that those nominated have been duly elected as directors of the corporation. Ladies and gentlemen, many of our directors are with us here today and are wearing their name tags. I hope you'll have an opportunity to meet and talk with them after the meeting over some refreshments. The third item of business today is the appointment of the corporation's external auditor and authorizing the directors to set their remuneration. As stated in the information circular, the audit committee has recommended to shareholders that Deloitte LLP be reappointed as the corporation's external auditor. Now, in order for someone to move this resolution.
Mr. Chair, I move that Deloitte LLP be appointed the external auditor of the corporation until the next annual meeting, and that the directors be authorized to set their remuneration.
Thank you, Ramy.
Mr. Chair, I second the motion.
Thank you, Carly. The resolution has been moved and seconded. The motion is now before the meeting for discussion. Adoption of this motion requires the favorable vote of a majority of the votes cast at the meeting by holders of each of the Class A limited voting shares and the Class B limited voting shares, voting as separate classes. Management has received proxies representing approximately 73% of the corporation's Class A limited voting shares and 100% of the Class B. These proxies direct me to vote over 98% of the Class A limited voting shares and all of the Class B limited voting shares in favor of the resolution. I will now call for the vote on the motion by a show of hands. All those in favor. Thank you. Opposed. Thank you. I declare the motion carried.
The fourth item of business today is the approval of the advisory resolution on the corporation's approach to executive compensation, which is described in the management information circular in greater detail. The corporation has put forth an advisory resolution at this meeting as part of its ongoing efforts to both meet its corporate governance objectives and responsibilities, and also to ensure a high level of shareholder engagement. Because this is an advisory vote, the results will not be binding upon the board. However, the board and Management Resources and Compensation Committee will most certainly take into account the results of the vote as appropriate when considering future compensation policies and decisions. The board welcomes comments and questions on the corporation's executive compensation practices. It's now in order for someone to move the motion.
Mr. Chair, I move that the advisory resolution accepting the executive compensation described in the management information circular dated May 2nd, 2016, be approved.
Thank you.
Mr. Chair, I second the motion.
Thank you, Ramy. The resolution has been moved and seconded, the motion is now before the meeting for discussion. As before, adoption of this motion requires the favorable vote of a majority of the Class A limited voting shares. Management has received proxies representing approximately 71% of the Class A limited voting shares, these proxies direct me to vote over 94% of the Class A limited voting shares in favor of the resolution. I will now call for the vote on the motion by a show of hands. All those in favor. Time to remind us. Thank you. I declare the motion carried. Turning to the final item of formal business. Today, shareholders are being asked to consider a resolution to approve the adoption of a new management share option plan. The corporation's use of stock options is an important component of its compensation arrangements.
The board believes that this practice achieves the greatest possible alignment between management and shareholder interest and assists in attracting and retaining qualified and motivated senior executives and employees. It's now in order for someone to move the resolution.
Mr. Chair, I move that the resolution to approve the adoption of the new management share option plan, as described in the management information circular dated May 2nd, 2016, be approved.
Thank you, Ramy.
Mr. Chair, I second the motion.
Thank you, Carly. The resolution has been moved and seconded. The motion is now before the meeting for discussion. Adoption of this motion requires the favorable vote of a majority of the Class A limited voting shares. Management has received proxies representing approximately 71% of the corporation's Class A limited voting shares, which proxies direct me to vote over 88% of the Class A limited voting shares in favor of the resolution. I will now call for the vote on the motion by show of hands. All those in favor. Contrary-minded. Thank you. I declare the motion carried. Ladies and gentlemen, that completes the formal part of today's meeting, and we'll now move to our management presentation. Bruce Flatt and Brian Lawson will be presenting on behalf of the management team.
At the end of the presentation, they'll be available to respond to any questions or comments that you might have. Please note that in responding to questions and talking about our new initiatives and our financial and operating performances, I'm required to tell you about forward-looking statements. These statements are subject to known and unknown risks, and future results may differ materially. For further information on known risk factors, I would encourage you to review the Business Environment and Risk section of management's discussion and analysis in our annual report. Ladies and gentlemen, I would now present to you our management. Bruce.
Good morning, thank you. Thanks, Frank, and thanks everyone for coming today. As everyone knows, here over the past 25 years, what we've done in the business is turned ourselves into one of the leading global managers of real assets around the world. The business, as most of you know, is very simple. We try to focus on the competitive advantages that we have to enable us to put money to work for the shareholders and for our clients in a most effective way to earn maximized returns without taking too much risk. There's really five things that we do. Firstly, we source equity from our clients and from our balance sheet. We put it into large-scale transactions and use our access to capital to be able to do those type of things.
We use our global reach to identify assets and try to buy them on a value basis. We finance them on a very low risk and long-term basis, we ensure that we never get ourselves in trouble in any of the assets that we have. Lastly, we try to use the large platform that we have built up and the business that we built up around the world, and the operational capabilities to try to squeeze more return out of those assets than you would otherwise get if you didn't have those people. First and foremost, though, when we're looking for investments, what we're always trying to do is to look around the world and find a spot where we can find value.
Often that means it's places which are out of favor, it's industries that are out of favor, or it's areas where people are moving away from. We're always trying to move in the direction where there is value around the world. There's really three distinct things that we offer our clients. That brings us to about $114 billion of fee-bearing capital that we have today, alongside the capital that we have invested off our own balance sheet. $44 billion of that is invested in the listed partnerships that we have that trade on the stock exchanges. $52 billion are in private funds, which are offered to our institutional clients and invest beside the listed partnerships. $16 billion are in our public markets business, which are listed securities managed on behalf of institutional clients. Which provides us very important benefits to the organization.
Firstly, it diversifies the source of capital that we have in the business. It provides a number of options to our clients that's becoming increasingly important as we offer those options to our clients, and they come to us because we can do large-scale things for them and put very large amounts of money to work for them. Third, it provides us a certainty of capital through turmoil when there's periods of turmoil. Lastly, it aligns the duration of our capital with the strategies that we have. What this has allowed us to do is to continue to build what we think of as a best-in-class global portfolio of real assets. We're in approximately 30 countries. We don't plan on being in too many more. We think we can deploy the capital we have and large amounts more into those areas.
We continue to build up the resources in each of the markets we're in to operate, find more, and grow value out of the assets that we have. The team today is about 55,000 people globally, which really allows us to enhance returns on capital. They often find organic investment opportunities within the businesses that we have, which is usually the best way to put money to work. It gives us an enormous advantage in due diligence and looking at things when we're trying to figure out assets in the market and we're looking at them. We've tried to use these competitive advantages first and foremost to benefit the clients. Because if our clients do well, and if our partnerships do well, and if our institutional clients do well, then Brookfield will do well.
First and foremost, we're always thinking about how do we benefit the clients within the organization. Far, and including the financial crisis, our average returns, if you look across our funds, are very strong, both in the opportunistic funds and the core plus and value add funds that we've offered our clients. That's one of the reasons why we've continued to be able to build capital up in the institutional funds that we offer in our partnerships. As I said, it's enabled us to continue to grow the fee-bearing capital at a pretty good clip. We're up to $114 billion, and we've continued to be able to put that to work in what we think are very good long-term investments, which will earn the returns we need to in each of the funds that we create for the clients.
As an example of a few of those over the past 18 months, we bought a business in the U.K. called Center Parcs. We offer rental units for people that want short stay vacations. It's a very unique business. It's not found anywhere else in the world. These are 400-acre parks where we rent villas or cottages to people, and it's an extremely robust business that's done extremely well since we've owned it. Second, we bought a large hydroelectric business in Colombia, which was almost $5 billion. It's 3,000 megawatts of hydro plants in Colombia. It used to be one of the national hydro companies of the country. We think it will be an exceptional investment longer term in a great country.
We bought a large multi-family rental portfolio in the U.S., a logistics business in Brazil, and have continued to work on a transaction to buy a port business in Brazil called Asciano. We continue to work on that transaction. In addition to that, within all of our operations all the time, we put money to work beside the investments we have. Usually, these are actually the best investments you can find, because they're the lowest risk because you actually know what's there, and you can just add on to the side of them. We're building a number of office developments around the world, either in the locations beside one of the buildings that we have or new developments in the cities that we're in.
We have a number of wind developments and some hydro developments that we're developing across the world. A lot of our infrastructure investments being toll roads, pipelines, transmission systems, have many add-on investments that we put onto the asset. We continue to build out a number of those across our portfolio. Turning to the markets. They've been pretty up and down. I guess everyone seems to be more aware of what's in the capital markets today. I'd say generally they're pretty favorable for us. The latter part of 2015 in the stock markets was a little rough. We don't view that this investment cycle is over. We actually think the volatility being out there is good because what it means is that people won't get too complacent.
If I reflect back to 2007, volatility was extremely low and people got complacent, and that was one of the issues that caused the financial crisis. There's no doubt, I'd say the exception to that is things exposed to commodities and to emerging markets. Many of those are still in stress, although we're starting to see signs of turning. Our belief is that interest rates will slowly move up in the U.S., but because rates have gone negative in other places of the world, or almost to zero in some places, and some negative, we think that we'll have a suppressing effect on what you would otherwise have seen in the U.S. with interest rates. We think it'll be a very slow grind upwards. What that means is that's very good for the type of assets we have, which I'll talk about in a minute.
Our global reach provides us with a very significant number of opportunities. Just because of the people we have out there, we see many things and people bring us many things. In North America, we're continuing to see this as an environment to recycle capital. We've been selling a lot of assets with long-term cash flows that we've done most of the operating things in that we can do, and we've turned them into almost fixed income instruments, for the next 10 years. Therefore, we've been selling and harvesting capital out of those investments. It's not that we think those are bad investments. In fact, the owners of those investments will be very happy with them for the next 10 years. It's just our money needs to earn higher returns than the capital that's going into those type of assets.
The opportunity is really to find exceptional assets which we can now fund at very low interest rates. The return on equity is good compared to otherwise what you would get in that economy. In Asia, we continue to methodically build out the business. We now have offices in Singapore, Tokyo, Seoul, Shanghai, and Hong Kong. We think there'll be many investments over the next 10 years that we'll be able to access and have continued to build up our resources there. In Brazil, we still believe in the continued long-term emergence of the country. It is a great country with a very strong middle class, with enormous resource base. They've had a tough ride for the last three years, we actually see the markets bottoming.
I think there's a number of opportunities that we'll still be able to add into the portfolio going forward. With that, we continue to see very strong flows of capital into the real asset business, which is generally what we think of as the four products that we offer our clients, property, renewable power, infrastructure, and our private equity business. There's really a couple reasons for that. One is that money continues to grow exponentially in the institutional client fund world. That's really for two reasons. One, once you get capital, if they earn 5%, 6%, 7% returns in those funds, the funds just exponentially multiply. Second, up until recently, many of the funds had very strong inflows, especially in the oil countries. That's abated a little bit, there's still a lot of capital forming into institutional funds.
Maybe more importantly than just the absolute amounts, what's happened over the last while is that because of interest rates getting very low in almost every country in the world, developed economy in the world, the funds are having a hard time putting that money to work. What they're doing now is allocating greater portions to real assets. It's really just simple math. If they have bonds, it says 2% here. In fact, the Treasury in the United States is one and a half for a 10-year, and less than that if you're less than 10. In virtually every other developed bond in the world, it's closer to zero. People can't invest their money in fixed income instruments anymore. They can either put them into credit, they can put them into equity, or they can put the money into real assets.
We're seeing a significant flow of money into real assets. We can still earn them 7%-15% returns on a conservative basis and sometimes higher returns than that. As a result of that, we continue to see more money heading into real assets, in this environment that we're in. We said this many years ago, that 40% of allocations of many institutional clients of their funds will be in real assets. Some will be higher, some will be lower, we continue to see that trend happening, and it may even be more than this when it's all over. That trend should continue irrespective of interest rates. There's four or five points that I just highlight. Number one is that global growth is very slow, it looks like that's going to continue for a while.
Number 2, the negative interest rates are putting enormous pressure on the Eurozone and in Japan. That money is flowing into America and into products like ours. Number 3, interest rates clearly are only going to rise if you see an improving economy. That will be muted because of what's going on in those other economies. Our business model works very well at anything south of a 5% 10-year treasury, and we're at 1.5% today. There's a long way to go of increased interest rates, and we can still earn very strong returns for our clients. Lastly, our belief is that despite any of that, real assets will retain their value over long market cycles. Therefore we think this is still an attractive place to be for our institutional clients and any of our partnerships as we grow them.
To evidence that, we just showed a simple slide here of our latest infrastructure funds. This is indicative of the whole industry. This is actually our results. Our funds have gone from $2.7 billion to $7 billion to $14 billion for infrastructure, from $4 billion to $9 billion for real estate, and from under $1 billion to $1 billion to $4 billion for private equity. You can just see the trend of increasing capital flowing into real asset funds, partly because we've grown our franchise, but partly just because there's been more money available to go into these type of assets. Our differentiation, what we've tried to do is to continue to have long duration capital to ensure that we had a large balance sheet to fund opportunities and to take advantage and capitalize on opportunities when they're there.
Most of our fee-bearing capital in the business is perpetual capital, or it's very long-term in nature. That gives great stability to the overall business and to the commitments we make to people that we invest for, we invest with, or people that we're doing transactions with. In addition, it provides great stability in the income of the company and the cash flows of the company and continues to compound away within the business. The strength of our balance sheet gives us also significant considerable liquidity for us to deploy within the operations. Our liquidity today is about $6 billion of core liquidity. We have undrawn fund commitments, meaning by contract, we can go get money from our clients and put it into opportunities. That's at our discretion to call that capital, and that's just under $20 billion.
We continue to monetize assets on the balance sheets we have in this environment of low interest rates where we can harvest capital at good returns. We have very broad access to the debt and equity markets, and we have a number of organic products that we're creating within the business. All of that allows us to continue to grow the asset management franchise. We remain focused, though, on making sure that we adhere to the value-based investment philosophy. Even though we've grown over the years, we've tried to ensure that we continue to keep that investment thesis within the business, which really means five things.
Acquire great assets, assume we're going to hold them forever, continue to try to buy them at less than replacement cost, put prudent financing on them so we never get in financial issues, and only try to acquire when capital is scarce as it normally means it's the right time, and try to work hard at execution within the portfolio. In conclusion, Brian and I will take questions. I guess we continue to think we're well positioned for growth within the business. As I said, we have significant liquidity and access to capital. We think we're building a world-class operating platform with a global footprint to be able to deploy the money that we have. Our assets are long life, many of them with growing cash flows. Our fundraising momentum is good.
There are many attractive investment opportunities in the world, largely because of the global franchise that we have. We've tried to align ourselves and our balance sheet with every client that we have so that we have our capital beside our clients, and that's very meaningful to any investment person when they're looking at something. That, I think, gives us a great strategic advantage. With that, if there are any questions, Brian or I would be happy to take them.
Hi, Mr. Flatt. My name's Robert Bart. I'm a stockholder. A thing that's occurred to me is whether there's any material risk to the company, I think not, in any possible outcome around this Brexit referendum. Is there one outcome that we would favor? Are we neutral? Is it really not a material issue to be concerned with from our company's point of view?
The question just is on Brexit and what-
Sure. Any exposure.
Any exposure. We have a significant business in London, and in the U.K. in general. Some businesses we have won't be affected by it, and some will be. We're strongly in the camp that the U.K. should remain. We think it's an important thing for the country and for the continent to remain together. We're strongly in favor of remain. Longer term, we're going to stay in the country, and it always has been a good economy to invest in.
Thank you.
You're welcome.
Mr. Flatt. My name is Kevin Thomas. I'm with the Shareholder Association for Research and Education. I'm here today on behalf of the British Columbia Teachers' Federation, which is a shareholder. My question relates to the operations in Qatar. Brookfield Multiplex, it's a global construction company, of course, part of our assets, and it's been in the Middle East since 1997. Really, there's a lot of questions around risks in Qatar, around labor practices, forced labor, problems with migrant workers, and health and safety particularly, which will get a lot of attention leading up to the World Cup there. We're a bit concerned about the exposure to that, how the company's managing health and safety risks in those operations.
Particularly, how Brookfield's upholding safe and decent working conditions by conducting credible verifications of the manpower agencies that you're using, doing random unannounced inspections of subcontractors, and most importantly, would consider doing some kind of sustainability report or reporting on the website about these kinds of risks to shareholders.
Thanks for the question. I'm going to let Brian answer the specifics of that question. I'd just say maybe just for everyone's benefit. One of the businesses that we have is a global construction business. We operate around the world. We're the largest contractor in Australia. We have big operations in the Middle East. We're the largest contractor in London. It's a very professional, very good business for us, and it has been for 10 years. We adhere to very high standards within the business.
Yeah. I'll pick up on that, thanks for the question. It is, as Bruce mentioned, it's something that is important to us, and it is a global business with very high health and safety standards, and we do apply those on a global basis. I think perhaps one of the simplest ways to think about it is that in Qatar, for example, our experience there, in terms of protocols and outcomes, most importantly, is equal to or even better than our operations in the U.K. and Australia. We've had very favorable performance in that regard there, but it's something we will obviously continue to be focused on, be happy to follow up with some of your specific questions offline. Thank you for your comments in that regard.
Thank you both.
Simple question. Do you have a major competitor? If so, would you name the major competitor, please?
I think the question is, who are our competitors? Is that?
Yes.
Our competitors.
Yes.
I'd say we have many. We have many competitors, and no one should ever think that they don't have competitors because the minute you do, you're in trouble. It's more specific to businesses. Our real estate business, we have many people that we compete with in the operating businesses and buying things, et cetera. In our infrastructure business, there's many great infrastructure companies around the world that we either compete with or operate beside or do things with. In our renewable power business, there's a lot of Europeans that buy assets similar to us. There are many competitors in the industry around the world. I'd say as an asset manager, there's, I guess, a handful to 10. Between five and 10 similar organizations that take money from clients, meaning our institutional funds.
They take money from institutional investors, and they put it to work in the sectors like we do. Some are in real estate, and some are in infrastructure, some are in private equity, and some are in all the above. Our business is a little more broad than most. It's larger than many. We have a bigger balance sheet, so we put more money into it from our own balance sheet. There's about eight or 10. Most of them are U.S.-domiciled companies. There isn't one really in Canada that would be similar to us. You're welcome.
Good morning. My name's Paul Durnin. I'm from Burlington. If there is a Brexit and 40% of the U.K. trade is with the continent, it was in the paper that HSBC says we're moving 1,000 bankers from London to the continent. I wonder if it could not be such a happy wave goodbye, and the EU put tariffs onto goods coming from England. I believe I'm right in saying that the British companies trading on the continent would then have to have their own offices there in the event of a Brexit. Maybe I'm looking too far out, but the EU could kind of come back at the U.K. in a nasty way on this.
Thanks for the question. I would just say we're in the remain camp, we're hoping everyone votes that way on next Thursday? Wednesday. Wednesday or Thursday.
How does it affect the company directly if it is the Brexit?
First, I was going to say Lord O'Donnell, who's a real expert in the U.K. and who's on our board, is in the front row over here. I might get him up after to answer questions if there's more on this. What I'd say is look, it's not known. Remember what happens if they don't vote remain, is there's really nothing happening. It's kind of like an advisory vote. There's no situation that's ever been tested like this, and they'd have to figure it out. We'll have to see what happens after if that occurs. We think it will remain.
I certainly hope so. Thank you.
I'll paraphrase the question just so everyone hears it. The question is, many of the pension plans, including CPP, have significant amounts of capital. They're putting it to work in real assets just like us. Are we working on the same side all the time, and shouldn't we be? I'd say everyone should work with us, there's no doubt. Here's what I tell you. What happened over the last 20 years, everyone used to invest. In fact, you go back 30 years. Most people invested their portfolios in fixed income in institutional client accounts. They went to equities, and it was very successful putting money into equities, and they diversified the portfolio that way.
What's happened over the last 10 years, and I give great credit to the Canadian pension plans here because they really did a great thing for the wealth of all individuals in Canada, is that they very early on realized we need to get out of fixed income because rates are coming down. We need to build the ability to put money to work in other assets like we deploy. Remember, all we do is essentially an outsourced investment management business for institutional clients. We're putting money to work for other people that don't have 700 people around the world investing for them. Some of the institutions do that themselves. There's not many that can do exactly what we do because they don't have 700 people, and they haven't been doing it for 25 years like we've done, or 40, 50 years like we've done.
Some do, and some are doing it themselves. Our business is taking money from the people that don't have those skills themselves, or even if they do, we can be additive to them. There are some institutions in the world that are doing it themselves, and those ones we're generally either not investing for, and once in a while, they're in a transaction either with us or possibly against us. That's just a fact of transactions in business. There's a huge, I guess, the point of putting up the slide of the amount of money that's in the world for real assets. There's an enormous amount of money that's out there that needs to go into products like we offer, and therefore, I think there's lots to go around.
Mr. Flatt. Given the embarrassment of riches that you have with your new successful fundraising and the large amount of new money that's going into real assets, surely there's a lot of competition for value investors around the world. Could you give some examples or specifics of areas or ways in which you expect to find really compelling investment opportunities in the near and medium term?
The question really comes down to do we have too much money for the opportunity set that's out there, I guess is the way I'd paraphrase that question. Generally, I'd just say that what we try to do is work off of our competitive advantages, which are really threefold. Number 1, we have more money than most people to put to work, largely because we're amassing capital from different institutional clients and from investors like many of you in this room. We try to focus on the size that we have and do transactions in that scale, and that enables us to eliminate many competitors. When we bought the hydro company in Colombia, it was $5 billion. Not too many people can have $5 billion to go and buy an investment in Colombia. Just a large amount.
That's the first thing we try to differentiate ourselves with. The second is we have operations in 30 countries in the world. It's one thing to say, "India is cheap. We should go to India and make an investment." It's not easy to make investments in India. It's not easy to operate assets in India. It's not easy to do things in India. You have to be there, you have to know how to do it, and you have to have people on the ground. We have people on the ground in 30 different countries, so it gives us a competitive advantage because we have people in those 30 countries, and we can pick the times when we go to each of those countries. Third, we have 50,000 operating employees or more, and those people give us incredible operating capabilities on the ground.
If you take those three together as competitive advantages, we continue to find lots of opportunities for the capital we have. In fact, we have more opportunities than capital. We have to be very selective as to what we invest into because there are more opportunities than capital. That's only because we've invested the money of the corporation to set up the franchise we have over the past 20 years. The direct answer is, even though we've been successful in raising a lot of money, I think we can still put it to work prudently and earn the returns we've promised to our investors.
You're welcome.
Seeing no other questions. One other question.
Sorry. Thank you. I don't share the concerns in regards to Europe that some others have. I think it might be the opposite, that there might be too much hesitation. I was hoping you'd talk about the value opportunities you see in Europe, especially in regards to the position in the Balkans. Thank you.
The position in the Balkans? Yeah. We've had an operation in Europe for 10, 12 years, we've continued to expand the business. Originally, we started in the U.K., we went on to the continent. We're in most of the countries in Western Europe today, being France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and a few others, but that's where the major money is. We think there's some great opportunities. We just bought 21 office, residential, and retail buildings in Berlin in a portfolio. We think it's an exceptional opportunity. We bought it 75% let and a 5% yield. We'll be able to grow the cash flows, and we're financing it at less than 2%. The levered returns are good. We continue to see opportunities there, and it's really focused on size.
That was a $1.3 billion transaction, our operating skills that we have that we can bring to the table. I think there are a lot of opportunities in Europe. We're a long-term investor, we think of these things in very long durations. We've never been in the other countries in Europe. I don't know whether we will be, it's really just for us to go to a country, we have characteristics that we have to meet. It has to be a country that's large enough that we can find big opportunities. It has to be a country where we can do most of the things that we do. We can do one, two, three of our businesses that we're in.
Otherwise, it's just not worth us setting up all the apparatus and learning the tax structure, getting in the country, and meeting all the senior people in the country, and all those kind of things. If we're going to go to a country, we want to make it meaningful enough that it can make a difference to us over the next 20 years, because it takes a lot of effort to set up. Lastly, we want to make sure it has the right culture of respective capital. We think of those three things when we go to a new country, we're very methodical about when picking specific countries, they usually have to have scale. Okay, Frank, I'll turn it over to you. Thank you.
Thank you, Bruce. Ladies and gentlemen, if there are no further questions or comments, I'd like to thank you for attending today. We truly appreciate your participation. We know there are many other things you could be doing with your time, and you've chosen to spend it with us. We're grateful for that, and we hope that you found the meeting informative. Executives, board members will be around for some time after the meeting as well and available should you have questions that you wanted to ask personally. That brings me to the end of today's meeting, unless there's any further business. Since there's no other business, I declare the meeting terminated.