EIB – non-sovereign
- Score:
- 35.0
- Position:
- 7 / 21
Overview
The European Investment Bank (EIB) is the European Union’s (EU) bank and is owned by its member states. EIB’s non-sovereign portfolio works with other EU institutions and the private sector to support EU policy and provides lending, blended finance, and technical advice for investment within and outside the EU. EIB was established in 1958.
Analysis
EIB came seventh in the non-sovereign DFI assessment with 35 out of 100. EIB performed relatively well for the Core Information component owing to the fact that it publishes projects to the IATI Standard. However, overall performance was negatively affected by the poor performance in the Impact Management and Financial Information components. Significantly, EIB did not disclose E&S risk categories which has a further negative effect on their performance in the E&S and Accountability to Communities component as all projects were assessed as potentially high risk.
EIB’s non-sovereign portfolio came sixth in the Core Information component, with 12.38 out of 20. It disclosed data for thirteen of the seventeen indicators. It scored 100% for six of these indicators, including accessibility, annual reports, status, project description, sector, and investment instrument. This is a result of EIB publishing to IATI and providing a bulk download file. However, EIB dropped points on other indicators as not all relevant data points were published to IATI or available in the bulk download file. Significantly, EIB was one of three non-sovereign DFIs not to score for the sovereign/non-sovereign indicator. It also failed to score for domicile, funding source, and E&S risk category.
EIB came joint twelfth in the Impact Management component with a score of 6.75 out of 25. EIB scored points for two out of the three organisation-level indicators, impact measurement approach and evaluations. It did not score for any project-level indicators.
EIB came joint eighth in the ESG and Accountability to Communities component, scoring 12.33 out of 30. It scored for all organisation-level indicators apart from independent accountability mechanism (IAM) community disclosure policy. It scored 100% for the E&S community disclosure policy, IAM global disclosure documentation, and project-level grievance mechanism (PGM) community disclosure policy indicators. However, it only scored for the IAM global disclosure indicator at the project level. As it is not possible to determine the E&S risk category of EIB investments all investments were treated as potentially high risk and E&S document disclosure was assessed in line with corresponding requirements.
EIB came joint second-last in the Financial Information component, with 1 out of 15. It only scored for the financial reports/statements indicator. It did not score for any project-level indicators.
EIB scored 2.5 out of 10 in the Financial Intermediary Sub-investments component, which was joint second. Although it scored for its policy to disclose private equity fund sub-investments, it did not score for project-level disclosure. It scored for FI (bank) use of funds but not for FI (bank) sub-investment disclosure.
Recommendations
- EIB should add more data points to its bulk download file that are already disclosed on its webpage, including total investment cost and date of activity disclosure.
- EIB should clearly label whether individual investments are sovereign or non-sovereign.
- It should disclose further Core Information indicators including domicile, disbursement, client contact, E&S risk category, approval date, and last update date. It should consistently disclose sub-national location, funding source, client description, and client contact.
- EIB should make adjustments to its access to information policy so that exceptions apply only where these protect against harm to identified legitimate interests.
- EIB should disclose project-level Impact Management indicators, including additionality statement, activity indicators/metrics, and results data for its projects.
- EIB should disclose project-level ESG and Accountability to Communities indicators, including summary of E&S risks and E&S documentation.
- It should create a policy guiding the disclosure of the presence of the IAM at community level.
- EIB should provide assurance of community disclosure for investments when disclosure is required.
- EIB should disclose the data included in the Financial Information project-level indicators of the DFI Transparency Tool.
- EIB should create a policy for disclosing FI sub-investments through banks. It should also publish sub-investments made through private equity funds according to its policy.