Global South

The European Investment Bank has opened a review of its energy policy and called for the public's views on the key future challenges for the bank's operations. The lending figures to the energy sector until 2011 show that the policy must better guide the EIB's lending towards EU policy objectives of de-carbonisation of the energy sector.

In Autumn 2012, the European Investment Bank has launched a process of reviewing its energy lending policy in order to align it better with EU climate goals. Bankwatch's comments lay out the case for fossil fuels to 'fall out' of the EIB's future energy lending policy - and for an overall more ambitious, and substantially more climate-sensitive EIB energy policy.

The European Investment Bank (EIB), the EU’s bank and also the biggest public financial institution in the world by lending volume, has launched a public consultation on its energy policy and is seeking views from the public and other stakeholders that should feed into a review of one of the EIB’s most crucial lending sectors. The new policy is expected to take effect from June 2013.

In this letter, five NGOs and NGO coalitions call on the EIB to undertake consultations according to the best standard as well as to identify and inform a wide range of stakeholders about the revision of the policy.

For ‘development’ activists used to fighting the excesses of project finance, it’s a bizarre shift. Instead of touting the usual dams and mines, in recent years ‘development’ banks have gone a step further: giving money directly to hedge funds, private equity firms and financial intermediaries, the croupiers of casino capitalism who almost ruined the world economy back in 2007-8 and are well on their way to ruining it properly this time around.

The letter, sent shortly before the European Investment Bank's annual meeting, calls on EIB governors to improve the EIB's lending before increasing its capital base as a response to the European crisis. The letter argues that in order to offer a long term solution, EIB backed projects should be economically, socially and environmentally sustainable. Right now this is not the case.

Bankwatch Mail invited two specialists, Matt Bull of the World Bank's Public Private Infrastructure Advisory Facility and David Price of the Centre for Primary Care and Public Health, Queen Mary, University of London, to debate the issue of PPPs in the developing world.