The owner of London City airport is to join the list of bidders for Gatwick when submissions are made on Monday.

Global Infrastructure Partners (GIP), a $5.6 billion (£3.8 billion) fund part-owned by Credit Suisse and General Electric, is understood to have formed a consortium that will bid £2 billion for Gatwick.

Other bidders will include Hochtief AirPort, a division of the German engineering company, and Citigate Infrastructure, which includes Citigroup, Vancouver Airports and John Hancock, the American financial institution.

Indicative bids are due on January 19 after a decision last year by BAA, the airports operator, to put Gatwick up for sale.

BAA is disposing of Gatwick to pre-empt an order from the Competition Commission to break up its monopoly of airports around London.

Sources close to BAA, which is owned by Ferrovial, the Spanish infrastructure group, said that the sale price would be significantly more than the regulator's £2.1 billion valuation of Gatwick.

However, a number of bidders have told The Times that the price was unlikely to be much above £2 billion.

In a draft report published last year, the Competition Commission said that BAA's ownership of Heathrow, Gatwick and Stansted in South East England was bad for passengers and airlines.

It has proposed that BAA sell both Gatwick and Stansted, but BAA is fighting to retain Stansted.

The commission's final report is due by the end of March and bidders have indicated that they do not expect the sale of Gatwick to progress significantly until then.

However, bidders have also expressed concern that regulatory and political obstacles in the bidding process could damage attempts to improve the airport in time for the 2012 Olympic Games.

One said: “If the sale is not completed by the end of this year, it is hard to see how the new operator would have time to invest and improve operation at Gatwick before the Olympics.”

Grant Thornton, the accounting firm, has been appointed as a shadow monitoring trustee to ensure that the sale is conducted fairly.

Bidders and the commission were concerned that BAA would seek a buyer that would be less of a threat to its other airports.

Grant Thornton's role is to ensure that bids are both fair value and are committed to the commission's insistence that standards improve at the airport.

Another likely bidder is Gatwick Future Partnership, a consortium led by Babcock & Brown's European infrastructure fund and Deutsche Bank's infrastructure fund.

The Ontario Teachers pension fund and Canada Pension Plan are also expected to bid, but the status of Manchester airport's proposed consortium with Borealis, a Canadian infrastructure fund, is uncertain.

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