Speeches

Mr President, Mr Vice-President, Mr President of the EIB, thank you very much for being here today; It's a pleasure to welcome you. I believe that the European Investment Bank does many things well, and the report acknowledges this: the work on the deployment of the Juncker Plan, the definition of the EIB as a climate bank and, of course, the investment in all these last years to improve capacity, increase domestic demand throughout the European Union, and also in development work. But I'd like to ask two questions here today. The first concerns both the President of the EIB and Vice-President Dombrovskis. We often talk about improving the EIB's democratic accountability to this House and about the EIB's capital problems; the report again calls for an increase in the EIB's capital. In recent years we have used the Union budget to give guarantees to the issues of the European Investment Bank itself, but I would like us to be able to explore the possibility that, from the budget of the European Commission, we enter directly into the capital of the European Investment Bank. The European Investment Bank's own Treaty should be reviewed, but we have already done so in view of the United Kingdom's departure. And, if the European Commission were present in the EIB's capital, I believe that control of this House would be much better and stronger. I would also like to ask you about the involvement of the EIB in the development of the Just Transition Mechanism, both through InvestEU and through the public sector credit facility. And two final concerns: We have received a lot of news about the EIB's human resources management, perhaps too presidential and not sufficiently democratised as it should be. I don't know if the president wants to take advantage of the appearance to comment on this matter. And it is true that the Ethics Committee ⁇ of whose existence we are pleased ⁇ in recent years has given too many waivers This is not really the case for one or the other Vice-President, but there are many Vice-Presidents working in the private sector and I think this should be reviewed.