09/04/2020 (Agence Europe) – In cooperation with the EIB group's European Investment Fund, the European Commission launched, on Wednesday 8 April, the ESCALAR (European Scale-up Action for Risk capital) pilot programme to support venture capital and private equity investments in 2020 for high growth European companies (scale-ups). An envelope of €300 million has been made available through an EIB guarantee to raise up to €1.2 billion of private investment. The ESCALAR initiative, which was announced at the presentation of the 'SME strategy' (see EUROPE 12447/3), is expected to continue if the pilot experiment is successful. With the COVID-19 pandemic, some of the usual investment channels (e.g. first stock market listing) for venture capital funds are closed. Via ESCALAR, the funds will receive support to help them through this period of uncertainty, the Commission promises. See: https://bit.ly/2JObXGm (MB)