In Valletta on Friday 23 September, the European Investment Bank (EIB) took position in favour of extending the Juncker investment plan until 2020, at the annual meeting of its governing council.
This announcement echoes the proposal of the European Commission to double the capacity and term of the plan created in 2015 to draw down €315 billion of additional investments up to 2018, which was presented in the state of the Union speech by the president of the Commission (see EUROPE 11624).
The European Fund for Strategic Investments (EFSI), the financial arm of the Juncker plan, provides a public guarantee of €21 billion (€16 billion from the EU budget and €5 billion from the EIB group). The Commission is proposing to increase the public guarantee of the EFSI from €21 billion to €33.5 billion, as it firmly believes that this move would raise €500 billion in new investments thanks to the leverage effect (1:15) related to the public guarantee.
On Friday, the EIB said that it could feasibly increase its contribution by €2.5 billion as a guarantee for the Juncker plan. For the Community budget, an envelope of €1.1 billion will be required. For the guarantee under the Community budget, the Commission will rebalance certain existing instruments, in combination with a use of the unallocated margins of the EU budget. Additionally, profits generated by projects will be fed back into the guarantee fund. Additionally, €150 million will be used from the margins of the budget and €500 million from the debt instruments budget of the Connecting Europe Facility (€345 million from the Energy CEF and €155 million from the Transport CEF). The research programme Horizon 2020 is not expected to be called upon any further.
In Malta, the EIB also approved 47 new projects with a total value of €7 billion, including 18 new projects of a combined value of €2.8 billion.
The extension of the Juncker investment plan will be dealt with as a priority by the European legislator, as the December European Council will be called upon to examine this dossier. (Original version in French by Mathieu Bion)