BW Mail 53

This issue is devoted primarily to the countdown to EU Budget ‘D-day’, and the negotiations now reaching a troublesome climax on how approximately 1 trillion euros of EU money is to be spent across the continent in the 2014-20 budgetary period.

We also round up some recent developments at the EBRD and EIB. And if you think that US presidential candidate Mitt Romney has a monopoly on private equity and tax havens, think again.

With the EBRD due to sign off on its new mining strategy in November this year, 22 MEPs have pointed out in an open letter to European commissioners that given the state of the policy draft the bank risks contradicting the EU Resource Efficiency Roadmap and responsible mining principles. At risk of being compromised too, Bankwatch believes, are the EU's 2020 strategy and EU commitments on climate change and biodiversity protection.

For its first loan to 'Arab Spring' countries the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development has chosen vehicles and partners whose ability to deliver developmental value is highly uncertain.

This summer’s 'silly season' featured a a blog post on the EBRD website replete with the claim that the bank has helped turn Serbia into a "role model for social inclusion of Roma". This claim immediately rang hollow in light of the ongoing plethora of abuses of Roma rights in Serbia.

The Oil Road by James Marriot and Mika Minio–Paluello is a remarkable recounting of their journey along the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline from Azerbaijan to the City of London. It is a narrative peppered with a wealth of cultural, social and economic history and kaleidoscopic insight from the Caspian region and beyond.

The storming of the US embassy in Cairo has diverted attention once again from the real issues facing Egypt. It couldn't have come at a better time for those who want to convince the Egyptian people to accept an International Monetary Fund loan and other western IFI interventions, and thus extend former president Hosni Mubarak's liberalisation of the economy.

With the European Investment Bank having recently postponed the annual face-to-face dialogue with NGOs that the bank's former president Philippe Maystadt initiated in autumn 2011, it was good to see new EIB president Werner Hoyer being put on the spot in September by MEPs during a hearing at the Europeam parliament's Economic and Monetary Affairs Committee.

It has been a busy time of late for the planned EUR 800 million, 500 MW Plomin C coal power plant. The Croatian government is pressing ahead with the project under the assumption that it will – along with the equally controversial EBRD-financed Ombla hydropower plant – save Croatia's ailing economy. Yet it is far from certain who will actually participate in the project, let alone finance it.

The European Investment Bank and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development have been awarded some of the worst transparency scores for international finance institutions in this year's Aid Transparency Index, published in early October by the campaign group Publish What You Fund.

Investments in transport infrastructure, particularly in the road sector, in the Czech Republic are stark reminders of wider failures in the country's decision making that have left public confidence in national officialdom at all time lows. Some of these investments have also lead to hefty penalties being imposed by the European Commission. With planning underway for future EU funding in the Czech transport sector, now is not the time for the Commission to take its eye off the ball.