Publications

The EBRD and the EIB are considering a loan of up to PLN 800 million to the Polish electricity utility ENEA to support a PLN 3.2 billion investment programme of the company’s distribution network. Bankwatch’s letter enquires what conditions will be placed on an EBRD loan to…

The European Commission’s proposed European Code of Conduct has the potential to become a major tool for securing effective partnership, transparency and public participation under the Cohesion Policy. This briefing contains recommendations to further support and realise thi…

This briefing outlines a number of aspects that – if improved – would enhance the European Commission’s proposal on the future EU budget and maximize benefits for the regions delivered by the future Cohesion Policy while contributing to reach the 2020 climate, energy and bio…

Issue 51 of our quarterly newsletter with campaign updates and analyses of international development finance issues.

No sooner had rumours started circulating in January that Robert Zoellick would be stepping down as president of the World Bank than our friends at the Bretton Woods Project fished out their administrator passwords and fired up the World Bank President website once again.

Early in the new year Bankwatch and partner groups lodged two complaints with the EBRD’s Public Complaint Mechanism (PCM): one concerning the loan agreement for the Rivne-Kyiv High Voltage Line project in Ukraine, the other concerning the EBRD’s Šoštanj lignite thermal power…

There is more or less consensus among various stakeholders that developing decentralised renewable energy sources (RES) to feed local energy demand is the only way to build a long-term, truly sustainable, effective and fair way to satisfy Europe’s energy needs.

It is coming up for three years since the EBRD’s 2009 Annual Evaluation Overview Report “alerted Management to develop a new Operation Policy to cover all forms of non-energy related extraction of natural resources (mining policy)”. The EBRD does not appear to have been in a…

For a bank tasked to contribute to the ‘balanced and steady’ development of the internal market in the interest of the EU, the EIB’s figures for its financing operations in 2011 (released last month at its annual press conference) induced a certain amount of head-scratching…

The ‘Counter Balance: Challenging the EIB’ coalition has written to Werner Hoyer, the new president of the EIB, welcoming him to his new post. Hoyer, formerly state secretary in Germany’s foreign office and a member of the Free Democrats, the junior partner in Chancellor Ang…

‘Carbon Rising’, a new study from Bankwatch, catalogues the EIB’s energy lending for the period 2007-2010 during which time the bank loaned EUR 40 billion to energy projects across the EU and EUR 8 billion outside the EU. This lending was guided by the EIB’s first energy pol…

Bankwatch Mail invited two specialists, Matt Bull of the World Bank’s Public Private Infrastructure Advisory Facility and David Price of the Centre for Primary Care and Public Health, Queen Mary, University of London, to debate the issue of PPPs in the developing world.