Стенограмма Президента Европейского Инвестиционного Банка Филиппа Майштадта
Philippe Maystadt
President of the European Investment Bank
Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, I didn’t come here to make a speech. When I had the honor to meet President Nazarbayev a few months ago in Brussels, the President asked me whether I knew this country, Kazakhstan. And I could only answer, “No, Mr. President, unfortunately, I do not know Kazakhstan.” So immediately the President invited me to Kazakhstan and suggested that I should come to this Astana Economic Forum and that I should listen, learn and start to become more familiar with Kazakhstan. So I would not dare to make a speech, but as I’ve been given the floor, I will use a few minutes to introduce to you, to introduce to this distinguished audience the European Investment Bank. The European Investment Bank is the bank of the European Union. It was created in 1958 by the Treaty of Rome. The Treaty of Rome created the European Commission, the European Parliament, the European Court of Justice and the European Investment Bank. So we are the bank of the European Union, and our mission is to support by long-term finance projects that contribute to the objectives of the European Union. And this explains why the bulk of our operations is within the European Union. Just to give you an idea, last year the European Investment Bank lent 79 billion euro, which by the way, makes the EIB by far the largest international financial institution in the world, it’s about twice the World Bank, so we are probably the largest, but more focused on one region in the world, on Europe: of the 79 billion 70 billion went to projects located in Europe. We can operate outside the Union only on basis of mandate given to the Bank by the European Council. And in December, 2006 for the first time the Council has decided to give a specific mandate for Central Asia to the European Investment Bank. So it’s quite recent, and before we can operate in a country, all operations have to be covered by the framework agreement, and until now we have two such agreements ratified by two countries in the region: by Tadzhikistan in 2009 and by Kazakhstan in 2010. So this means that now that this framework agreement is in place we can start to explore the possibility of funding projects in this country in the areas of energy and environment. We will give priority to projects which will contribute to the improvement of energy supply security and diversification and energy sustainability and to environmental protection. It is fully in line with the priorities of the European Union especially when it launches its new EU 2020 Strategy, but it’s also fully in line with the conclusions of the international conference organized last year here in Astana, and this conference on environmental integration and sustainable development also concluded that there is a real need for more investment in energy and environment in this region. Therefore we will look at the several projects: development of additional supply routes and infrastructure for the transportation of energy resources, rehabilitation of existing gas, oil and electricity transportation networks, installation of environmentally friendly generation infrastructures, improvement of water supply and water sanitation, reduction of industrial pollution, improvement of waste management. And we can do this with both public sector entities and private sector companies. We think that Kazakhstan has a huge potential with extensive investment opportunities, in fact, we see Kazakhstan as a leader among Central Asian countries in terms of investment potential/ Last month we had a visit of our experts (we are a special bank, because we have a lot of engineers in our bank, and they came to Kazakhstan last month) and they already identified potential projects for EIB financing. We will work on this, we will work of course in cooperation with other financial institutions, EBRD and Asian Development Bank with which we have already long established a relation in other regions, so I’m pretty sure that we will be able to conclude some concrete projects and to start a cooperation before the end of this year, so I conclude here. Thank you for attention, and again at the invitation of the President I’m here not to make a speech, but mainly to listen and to learn. Thank you very much.
