The European Investment Bank (EIB) tabled proposals to euro-area finance ministers on Monday (7 October), during which the lender would actively kickstart the bloc’s Capital Markets Union plans and channel funds to European companies seeking to scale up.
The head of the EU’s investment arm, Nadia Calviño, has expanded the EIB’s role beyond its more traditional development and green-bank functions, boosting lending to defence projects earlier this year and pitching it as a key vehicle to tackle the bloc’s private financing needs.
“The EIB is itself already a CMU instrument,” Calviño told reporters after presenting an “action plan […] that will help channel savings into productive investments” to 20 EU ministers meeting in Luxembourg.
“The EIB Group plans to scale up support for the EU venture capital and private equity markets to help close the funding gap throughout the whole innovation and corporate cycle [..] to support the development of the Capital Markets Union,” she said.
“We’re talking about ensuring that European companies, technologies that are born in Europe, stay in Europe and that we invest in Europe’s champions, in Europe’s unicorns,” Calviño added.
The proposals, which the EIB said in a separate statement were set out “after months of intensive engagement with member states and financial markets partners,” would have already received “broad support by the [bank’s] board of directors, as well as by its actual investment unit (the European Investment Fund, or EIF) last week.
This would consist of two main projects: an expansion of the EIB’s European Tech Champions Initiative—which was set up last year to lend high-growth capital to tech companies—and the creation of an “exit platform” to finance the acquisition or listing of start-ups in their later stages of growth.
The “tech champions” programme would leverage on the EIF’s operations as a so-called fund of funds – i.e. an investment fund that buys into different European asset managers’ portfolios allocating to European equities, so there wouldn’t be direct exposures to companies’ shares.
Meanwhile, Euractiv understands that the EIB is still mulling different options around the “exit platform” plan, which could see the EIB help larger companies buy late-stage start-ups or underwrite these start-ups’ share issues into the public market.
The bank now expects these proposals to be “further discussed and finalised” with the EU’s 27 finance ministers – who act as the bank’s governors – “and in partnership with the European Commission.”
(Anna Brunetti | Euractiv.com)
Source: euractiv.com
