All of a sudden, the EIB has shot to the top of everyone’s Christmas card list.

European Commission president Barroso is flagging the EIB as part of a European framework to deal with the economic crisis.

Industry commissioner Verheugen wants a EUR 40 billion “soft loan” package from the EIB to help the European car industry belatedly gets its act together on CO2 emissions (T&E comprehensively rebutted Verheugen’s “no subsidies” apologia on Wednesday, but no sign of a link to their release).

And UK finance minister Darling has been pushing UK banks to make the most of the EIB’s increased global loans facility.

Only you don’t hear mention of “global loans” in such coverage, but there’s a lot of money getting talked up, there are clearly a lot of needy SMEs out there - so let’s get the money out the door as quickly as we can, no messing about. Which sums up the way global loans at the EIB have been done for many years, as this new clip from Counter Balance depicts. The cartoon’s focus is on outside EU lending, but the same applies within the EU.

RELEASE!

With comments such as “very vague” and stressing the need for “greater detail” in how the EIB will exercise its “discretion to apply EU standards or social standards, or not” (emphasis added), the International Finance Corporation (the World Bank’s private lending arm) has provided its input to the EIB’s public consultation on its currently draft Environmental and Social Statement.

The IFC’s comments are not long, they are brutally concise. They succeed in unravelling some reasonably aspirational proposals on social protection that the EIB is attempting to finesse, unfortunately, with its trademark discretionary language. As IFC notes:

“The effect of these things might mean that you simply would not apply social standards in a majority of your projects outside EU, potentially because you do not ordinarily require the discipline of due diligence on social issues within EU, and hence your internal capacity simply dictates what is possible or not in the emerging markets (but mostly not possible).”

Ouch. A revised draft of the statement, featuring hopefully some fundamentally revised thinking and language, is due soon. A range of inputs to the first draft is available on the EIB website, but oddly lacking are contributions from business. Are we to believe that the EIB’s principal beneficiaries had nowt to say on the new statement, a statement which:

“informs not only the staff of the EIB but also the large number of other parties with whom the Bank works in order to fulfil shared environmental objectives, including other EU institutions, in particular, the European Commission, other Multilateral Financial Institutions (MFI), financial and business interests, and representatives of civil society, including non-governmental organisations (NGO).”

Commercial confidentiality surely has no application in the shaping of shared environmental objectives.

According to an EIB press release in 2001, the 4.2 billion dollar Chad-Cameroon pipeline project was all about securing “a real breakthrough for Chad, one of the least developed countries in the world.”

Judge for yourself the merits of that prediction with today’s news that the World Bank has pulled out of the project citing the Chadian government’s failure to honour an agreement to use some oil revenues for poverty reduction.

The EIB has provided the project with 144 million euro financing, and its intentions remain unclear. Having “aligned” itself with the World Bank when Paul Wolfowitz oversaw the bank’s pioneering initiative in Chad disastrously and predictably unravel in early 2006, the EIB suspended co-operation on any new public sector projects in Chad. But expect the EIB to keep its head down here: it will be busy considering whether the project’s “social and environmental concerns have been met” (in the language of a European Parliament resolution from 2000 – strange language at that, you almost know what they mean). As Korinna Horta of Environmental Defense Fund writes of the project, however, in Counter Balance’s Citizens’ Guide to the European Investment Bank:

“It has fuelled violence, impoverished people in the oil fields, and along the pipeline route it has exacerbated pressures on indigenous peoples and created new environmental problems. At the same time, with about 118 million barrels of oil produced by September 30, 2005, ExxonMobil, the leader of the oil consortium and the world’s largest oil company, has registered record profits.”

Well over half of the EIB’s lending for the project went to the oil consortium.

More EIB involvement in dirty energy projects in Africa looks likely following the announcement this week of a one billion dollar EU aid package to expand Africa’s energy sector. Oil and gas pipelines between African countries feature heavily (along with “transparency”) in this Africa-EU partnership, as does the Europe-bound nine billion euro Trans-Sahara Gas Pipeline. Exactly what the bank “promoting EU climate change and energy objectives” is being lined up for in all of this will be something to watch.