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Brussels – The President of the Government of Spain, Pedro Sánchez, and 18 other heads of state and government of the EU have urged the President of the European Investment Bank (EIB), Nadia Calviño, to increase its funding for the European defense industry in a letter this Friday.
The letter, drafted at the initiative of the Prime Minister of Finland, Petteri Orpo, bears the signature, in addition to Sánchez, of the leaders of Belgium, Croatia, Cyprus, Denmark, Slovakia, Estonia, Greece, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Czech Republic, Romania, and Sweden.
This request comes a day after Calviño announced that the EIB will double its investment in defense by 2025 to 2 billion euros in response to the mandate of European leaders to further improve access for European defense companies to financing.
In their letter, the leaders thank the efforts of the EIB, but also emphasize the “urgent need” to mobilize additional investments to strengthen the EU’s defense and security capacity, a topic that will focus the leaders’ debate at their informal meeting next Monday in Brussels.
The letter also includes a series of proposals to increase funding for the European defense industry, starting with a redesign of the list of activities excluded from EIB financing to reflect the EU’s current policy priorities.
In May 2024, the EIB already waived the requirement that dual-use projects obtain more than 50% of their expected revenue from civil use, so now the only condition is that funded projects ensure a “credible civil use.”
Nevertheless, this group of 19 countries is asking to go a step further so that the EIB can provide financing to projects exclusively intended for defense.
Likewise, the leaders are calling for an increase in the proportion of funds allocated to defense and are also proposing the possibility of financing these projects through debt issuance, as the EIB already does with clean transition projects. (January 31)