By Ahmed Eljechtimi
RABAT (Reuters) – Funding Ukraine’s reconstruction “should not” eat into funds to be allocated to projects in other countries outside the EU, a senior official of the European Union’s lending arm said.
“Increasing liquidity for Ukraine will increase our overall liquidity,” Vice President of the European Investment Bank (EIB) Ricardo Mourinho Felix told Reuters while on a visit to Morocco.
Under its offshoot, EIB Global, the EIB has tended to allocate 10% of its annual spending to countries outside the EU.
“I expect that when the war stops in Ukraine or parts of it to start reconstruction … Ukraine will be the biggest reconstruction project since the Second World War not only for EIB but for all democratic economies,” he said.
The EIB has not financed any project in Russia since 2014 following EU sanctions “but Russia is still our counterpart for existing operations…we expect Russia to serve its debt in normal conditions,” he said.
The war in Ukraine should also serve to speed up the global energy transition, he said.
The bank plans to mobilize 100 billion euros to fund energy transition.
In Morocco, the second-largest country of operations for the EIB outside the EU and after Egypt, the EIB is already funding multiple renewable energy projects.
During his visit to Casablanca, the EIB and the BCP, one of Morocco’s largest lenders, signed a deal to promote low-carbon exports by small businesses.
(Reporting by Ahmed Eljechtimi; Editing by Bernadette Baum)
