Debate: Financial activities of the European Investment Bank – annual report  - Control of the financial activities of the European Investment Bank - annual report
Date: TUESDAY, 11 JULY 2023
Speaker: Werner Hoyer
Language: EN

So probably – no, definitely – I will not be able to do justice to each and every one of you who has spoken, because then we would be here for quite a while, but I promise you, nothing will be forgotten. My colleagues in the Brussels office will make sure that we come back to you individually if we think we need to clarify something.  When I took over the role at the EIB almost 12 years ago, I did not expect that short after that, the huge investment gap in Europe would become terribly obvious. And the Juncker plan, the investment plan for Europe, was one of the responses to that.  Shortly afterwards, Europe all of a sudden realised that we have a serious climate problem. Then, of course, that brought the EIB to be ambitious on that and later on, in 2019 at the General Assembly of the United Nations, we became the climate bank of the EU.  At that time, we didn’t have a clue that shortly afterwards we would be confronted with a global health crisis that we were not prepared for. And in the COVID-19 context, EIB played a very, very important role. The reason for this was, as so often in other fields, that the bank is blessed with in-house expertise on science, technology and engineering, and on life science in particular. Most of you probably will have a vaccine in your arms that people from the EIB encouraged the industry to develop.  So this is a hell of an experience, and then the real hell came with the war in Ukraine. Who would have expected a war within Europe? I think the bank has delivered, but also by reminding itself and ourselves that, according to the Treaty on the European Union and the statute of the bank, we are there to support the strategic interests of the European Union with the means of project finance. We’re not the budget finance here. We need to support projects, projects that have an impact.  The volumes are great, of course – yes, we are the biggest multilateral bank in the world, but this is volume measurement. What counts is the impact, the difference we can make for the people in Europe and beyond.  For that, it is absolutely vital to mobilise the financial power of the private sector. Public money alone will never be enough in order to reach the objectives that we are setting ourselves and that we are expected to pursue. So mobilising the private sector and, to a large extent, and I think Ms Winzig made reference to this, it is via SMEs, or in favour of SMEs. This is why, for instance, the European Investment Fund, our subsidiary, is of such enormous importance, and I thank the Members who have recognised that.  What we must not forget, with all these good intentions and impacts, is that the EIB is a bank and not a grant agency. And being a bank means we lend money. And in order to be able to do that, we need to borrow money. My signature is on the bond issuance of EUR 70 to 100 billion of bond sales per year. Why should a private investor give this institution her or his money? Because she or he is of the opinion that they’ll get the money back and we will make good use of this money. And the rating agencies support that every year by saying, okay, this bank is rock solid: first, it has an incredible in-house expertise that allows it to scrutinise projects in a very, very unusual way, and second, obviously, we have the support of our shareholders. And I thank the shareholders of the bank, the Member States and the European Commission, our main partner, for this excellent cooperation.  Strategic interests, of course, are the focus of our work for and in Ukraine. And I must tell you that our experience in Ukraine, of course, dates back since the independence of Ukraine. But the key situation was in 2014, when I remember saying to our board, ‘Colleagues, this guy is not going to stop on Crimea. This is going to go on.’, and we cut our business in Russia, the big project partnership for modernisation, and repurposed the funds made available this way, in particular in the neighbourhood of Russia, in particular in Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia.  We are very, very serious when it comes to this. Marek Belka asked what is going to be our role once the war is over and we do the reconstruction. First, the reconstruction must start now, not when the ink on the peace treaty is dry but now, because otherwise the bill is going to be much, much, much higher. But then we need to support Ukraine on its way towards the membership in the European Union. Some people have a horror vision of that happening. I think it’s a great opportunity. We underestimate the power and the strength, the potential that is with the people of Ukraine.  So we will be able to continue this strategic work in Ukraine and around Ukraine only if we can borrow money for that. And, to be quite blunt, if you finance the same hospital on the same bridge for the second and third time because the Russians have come back and destroyed the bridge again, then you need to have a convincing argument vis-à-vis your private sector investors who buy your bonds. Well, that reassurance for them comes from the budgetary support that we get from the European Union via guarantees. And I hope that we will be able to resume that very, very soon because this is absolutely vital. Now, for the transition period, we have set up a fund, which is supported by many Member States, and I hope we will be covering the rest of this year before the revised MFF will be on the table.  There are worries about the lack of EU guarantees for Ukraine right now. There are huge worries for our work in the developing countries in the Global South. The ACP mandate, the Cotonou mandate, was about to run out. It has just been prolonged by a couple of months and then we’ll be back to square one. That means by then, maybe at the end of this year on 1 November, the EIB will not have a banking license anymore in 79 countries of the world. Do we want to do this disgrace to the European Union? When we talk about the role of Europe in the Global South, please have this on your plate as well, when we talk about the future of the bank and Europe.  So thank you very much for giving me the opportunity to speak again here today. I think in some cases I’ll have to come back to you individually. Thank you very much, good luck.