Brussels, 26/10/2015 (Agence Europe) - Since the start of 2015, the European Investment Fund (EIF) and equity funds across Europe have signed investment agreements worth over one billion euros with the support of the European Fund for Strategic Investments (EFSI), the financial arm of the Juncker plan, which is designed to draw down €315 billion in additional investments by 2017.
The EIF, which operates under the aegis of the EIB, delivers “significant results for small businesses as part of the Investment Plan for Europe”, having already signed “more than 50 operations under EFSI, with total financing exceeding €1.2 billion, which is expected to trigger more than €17 billion of investments”, said the Commissioner for Growth, Jyrki Katainen, at a conference on the Juncker investment plan on Monday 26 October. He explained that 65,000 small- and medium-sized enterprises will benefit from these equity financing agreements in Germany, Belgium, Bulgaria, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, the Czech Republic and the United Kingdom.
The EFSI will be made up of a steering committee, where the European Commission and the EIB will have seats, and an investment committee responsible for awarding the public guarantee based on the EU budget to projects supported by the Juncker plan and selected on merit by the EIB (see EUROPE 11364). “The recruitment process of the Investment Committee experts is nearly complete. The committee should be in place in November”, Katainen said, adding that the next stage will consist of distributing information on the Juncker plan in the local economic fabric and to mobilise the available private capital.
The resources of the EFSI targeting SMEs are mobilised through a significant increase in the EIB's venture capital via the EIF.
For more information: http://www.eif.org/what_we_do/efsi/equity-deals.pdf (Original version in French by Mathieu Bion)