Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2011-04-07-Speech-4-040-000"
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"en.20110407.3.4-040-000"2
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"Mr President, I am grateful to all the speakers for their comments, even though I felt that one of them was particularly inaccurate. Clearly, in the time I have available to me, I cannot respond in detail to all the extremely interesting issues that have been raised. Some of them, I think, could be examined in more depth in committee.
Moreover, we have acknowledged experience and expertise in certain areas. To give you an example, we are called on to provide technical advice for projects that we cannot finance because they are based in a region outside our mandate. I therefore think that it would be a shame not to use that expertise. In certain areas, such as urban transport, energy efficiency, the water cycle and support for SMEs, the EIB has clearly developed expertise that is rather unique. I shall therefore conclude by saying that it would be a shame not to fully exploit that potential, through cooperation with the European Parliament that is perhaps more systematic and more structured.
Some very valid questions have been asked. We are financing more in Turkey simply because that is our mandate, decided jointly by the Council and Parliament. It has set us the task of financing more in the candidate countries, which means that we finance proportionally more in Turkey and in Croatia than in other countries. We are here to carry out the mandates that are given to us by the European authorities, in particular, by the Council and Parliament. I therefore believe that this justifies, perhaps, systematic and more structured cooperation with the European Parliament.
In particular, there was the important issue raised by Mrs Hübner. If you want the EIB genuinely to be able to make a significant contribution to the implementation of the Europe 2020 strategy, in particular, through the development of joint instruments with the Commission, then the regulatory framework obviously has to allow it. Whilst you are currently debating the new draft financial rules, I think that you should be careful to ensure that the European Investment Bank will actually be able to make that contribution. The proposal made by the Commission seems to us, from that point of view, to be wholly appropriate. The Council and Parliament still need to accept it, though. You therefore have a part to play in reviewing the financial rules.
I think that a more in-depth study would also be worthwhile for other issues that have been raised: the issue of tax havens, which Mr Canfin addressed. I can confirm to him that the European Investment Bank has a stricter policy than the other international financial institutions on this issue, which also explains why we recently had to refuse to cofinance certain projects with the African Development Bank, the World Bank and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development: they failed to meet the stricter criteria that we have in this regard.
Nevertheless, I can tell Mr Canfin that it is out of the question for us to finance a promoter located in a country on the OECD’s blacklist, but I am quite prepared to examine this issue in more detail, together with the issues raised by Mr Klute, which included loans to small and medium-sized enterprises and transparency in that regard. I do not think that there are many financial institutions that are willing to give as much information about allocations to small and medium-sized enterprises, and I would stress that there has been a marked increase in the number of small and medium-sized enterprises that have benefited from loans granted by the European Investment Bank to intermediary banks. More than 60 000 small businesses benefited from them in 2010.
I should like to highlight three features that make the European Investment Bank a rather unique institution. The first is that, contrary to what one of you said, we do not use taxpayers’ money.
To be clear, we do not ask the UK taxpayer for one single cent.
We do not use taxpayers’ money; we use the funds that we raise every day on the world’s financial markets. Indeed, that is why it is essential for us to maintain our triple A rating. We borrow in Asia and the United States, and with the resources thus collected, we can finance projects on favourable terms. The only budgetary impact is the guarantee that is given concerning the political risk in implementing the external mandate granted to us by the Council and Parliament. Here, there is, in fact, a guarantee that has a provisional cost for the European budget, since we set aside 9% of all loans granted under the external mandate – we do so two years after the first disbursement – and, of course, this amount decreases as the loans are paid back. Therefore, since we do not actually have to use that guarantee, there is ultimately no cost to the European budget. None! It is important to realise, then, that we are clearly not an institution that costs taxpayers money.
The second feature: we are the only truly European financial institution; our shareholders are all Member States, and they are exclusively Member States of the European Union. We are the only financial institution that is legally obliged, under the Treaty, to financially support the European Union’s political objectives. Furthermore, we are the only financial institution that cannot finance a project unless it has already received the favourable opinion of the European Commission. The European Commission delivers that opinion after an assessment by all the services, by all the Directorates-General, from the Directorate-General for Competition to the Directorate-General for the Environment. We are therefore bound to strictly apply European rules and policies. We are subject to audits by the Court of Auditors to the extent required by the tripartite agreement. We cooperate at all times with the European Anti-Fraud Office (OLAF), and I would add that we are on the verge of agreeing to supervision by the new European Banking Authority. In any case, as far as the European Investment Bank is concerned, we would be quite happy to submit to an official form of banking supervision. We are supervised indirectly, for example, by people with experience in banking supervision who we involve in our audit committee. However, I would confirm once again that we are completely open to proper supervision by this new European authority.
To conclude, the third feature that I should like to highlight is the fact that the European Investment Bank is also rather unique because of the kind of expertise it has developed. We are an institution that permanently employs more than 100 engineers, plus a number of specialist consultants, which is rare for a bank."@en1
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