Zee Beam News

22.05.2006 MosNews - The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development rolled out its five-year strategy to invest more cash in southeastern Europe and Russia and away from new EU nations, at the outset of its annual conference in London, AFP reported. Under the plan, the bank hopes to reduce its presence in eight of the new European Union member states — the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, the Slovak Republic and Slovenia. The bank said on Sunday, May 21, that the so-called EU-8 were on course to graduate from the EBRD and complete their transition to full market-economy status by 2010. As a result, the EBRD will re-allocate more resources to Russia and to southeastern Europe where countries including Bulgaria and Romania are battling for EU membership. "The EBRD is changing and is confident of repeating the success of the past in the new environment of the future," EBRD President Jean Lemierre said in a statement announcing the gear-change in policy. "With... different investment approaches required for the countries outside the EU-8, the Bank will look very different in five years' time from how it looks now and certainly how it looked five years ago," added Lemierre, who has been the bank's president since July 2000. The EBRD operates across 27 countries in southeast and central-east Europe, the Baltic states and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) — the latter being a loose grouping of 12 former Soviet republics. The bank's Transition Report Update published Sunday said the 27 countries, including Latvia, Serbia and Uzbekistan, grew on average by 5.6 percent last year. That compared with record growth of 6.7 percent in 2004, which had marked the highest rate since the collapse of communism. Average gross domestic product growth was forecast to slow to about 5.3 percent in 2006. The five-year strategy, meanwhile, was endorsed on Sunday by the EBRD's board of governors. "Our bank will intensify the move of our activities to the east and to the south where new challenges, new difficulties but for sure new opportunities are beckoning," Steven Kaempfer, EBRD acting first vice president, told delegates at the two-day conference. The graduation of the EU-8 countries was "an extraordinary vision that fills us with pride and excitement... and must rank as one of the really historic events of our time and of our generation", he added. The EBRD, which was founded in 1991 to assist the transition of former communist nations to market economies, invests just under four billion euros (5.1 billion dollars) each year across the region in which it operates. "Our vision is that in three or four years' time about 40 percent of this will be in Russia, and the rest will be in the other countries of the CIS as well as the countries... to the east and to the south," Kaempfer said. The development bank is meanwhile launching its Sustainable Energy Initiative at the conference in a bid to address the issues of energy waste and security, climate change, and the need for cleaner sources of energy. The EBRD represents 60 shareholder governments as well as the European Community and European Investment Bank.