John Laing denies flotation claims

"The company is not being floated, I can tell you categorically," Adrian Ewer said, after describing the report in the Independent on Sunday newspaper as "total rubbish".

Separately, an article published last week by trade magazine Infrastructure Journal said John Laing, which is owned by fund manager Henderson Group, was looking to tap public equity markets via a float of an infrastructure fund.

"The company first thought about this notion in 2005 and has been thinking about it ever since.

"It is something that at some point in time the company may do," Mr Ewer said.

"That is just part of the ways in which we might recycle capital to invest in new infrastructure projects," he added, declining to give detail on the sum the company would seek to raise through an IPO of the fund.

"There is absolutely no deadline," he added, declining to comment on the reports that JP Morgan Cazenove has been appointed as adviser. "We use advisers all the time," he added.

Henderson bought John Laing in 2006, using most of the capital raised by the Henderson PFI Secondary Fund II.

The fund lost 60 per cent of its value since launch in 2006, prompting some investors to threaten legal action in a fight for compensation.