Transparency allergy reappears at EIB, crisis billions still cloaked in confidentiality

February 4, 2010

CEE Bankwatch Network today criticised the European Investment Bank (EIB) for adopting a new transparency policy that persists in keeping the final destination of billions of publicly backed money unknown to the public.

Information on loans from commercial banks across Europe, that have received credit lines from the EIB, to final beneficiaries such as small- and medium-sized companies, public authorities, mid-companies, investments funds or equity funds remains unobtainable to the public, under the EIB's new transparency policy signed off this week by the bank's directors. This type of lending is a central – and growing – plank of the EIB's economic crisis response. [1]

Anna Roggenbuck, Bankwatch's EIB Campaign coordinator, said: “The EIB's unwillingness to permit just a chink of light on its lending through financial intermediaries is symptomatic of the new policy as a whole. If one of the lessons of the economic crisis is the need for greater transparency in the financial system, then the message has not got through to the EU's bank.”

Bankwatch's assessment of the new transparency policy finds that it leaves the EIB as the least transparent of the major public international financial institutions.

Anna Roggenbuck continued: “In spite of a wide range of inputs from civil society groups calling on the EIB to take a more pro-active approach to information disclosure in the interests of the environment and good value for EU money, the EIB's discomfort with real openness for its lending has again come to the surface.

“Marginal changes have come about from this review of the EIB's transparency policy, with the result that for the foreseeable future the EIB's response to the economic crisis will continue to be exclusively about big lending numbers, with far too many gaps in information to allow for a proper assessment of what good, and potentially bad, projects the EIB is supporting in the EU's recovery efforts.”

A positive step forward in the new policy, that has come about because of the EIB's requirements to adhere to the Lisbon Treaty, concerns better access to EIB documents where there is now a clear commitment that exceptions to disclosure will be treated narrowly and after analysis of individual cases, an improvement on the EIB's previous Public Disclosure Policy.

CEE Bankwatch Network also welcomed the refinements made to the EIB's Complaints Mechanism which provide it with operational independence within the EIB structure and which have made the complaint procedure itself considerably clearer.