Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2009-03-25-Speech-3-151"
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"en.20090325.24.3-151"2
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"Madam President, we have just voted to double the capital of the European Investment Bank. It is worth standing back and asking, ‘What is the European Investment Bank for?’ In theory it is there to make soft loans available to struggling businesses, but who are, in fact, the recipients?
In the 1990s, the single largest beneficiary of EIB largesse in the United Kingdom was British Airways, which is hardly a small firm operating within tight profit margins. I cannot help noting parenthetically that, throughout this period, British Airways was also a chief sponsor of the campaign to get Britain into the euro.
I stand back and ask again: what is the purpose of the European Investment Bank? I think the answer to that question is that the purpose of the EIB is the employment of its own employees. It has become part of the Brussels racket, this massive mechanism for taking money from the taxpayer and distributing it to those fortunate enough to be employed within the system. The EU may once have been an idealistic – or at least an ideological – project, but it has long since become a handy way to make a living, which of course is what makes it so wretchedly hard to dislodge."@en1
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