The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) is planning to invest an average of 300 million euro in Bulgaria for each of the next five years.
This was announced at the EBRD annual meeting that took place in London on May 21-22.
Under the banks new five-year strategy, 550 million euro every year will go to Bulgaria and Romania. The EBRDs interest in the two countries is dictated mainly by their expected accession to the European Union in 2007.
The EBRD wants to strengthen its presence in Bulgaria and it will create a fund for co-financing projects by Bulgarian municipalities, Finance Minister Plamen Oresharski said.
As the leader of the Bulgarian delegation to the forum, Oresharski met on May 21 with EBRD president Jean Lemierre and other representatives of the bank.
After the meeting, Oresharski said that EBRD may give Bulgaria a loan for the Transit Roads 5 project for building first- and second-class roads in the country, a task worth 380 million euro. The previous four phases of the Transit Roads programme already saw a lot of funding coming from the EU, mainly for rehabilitation of Bulgarian roads but also for the building of new ones.
Bulgaria sees the European Investment Bank (EIB) and the EBRD as key partners in the countrys preparation for absorption of EU funds, Oresharski said.
The EBRD strategy on Bulgaria includes the key components on which the Bulgarian side insisted, he said.
They include support for municipalities not so much in terms of financing, which, as a rule, is little (about 15-20 per cent), and not so much about co-financing as in terms of project design, according to Oresharski.
Financing from the EIB and EBRD is treated on an equal footing as contracting loans from local banks, which is why the two institutions are more valuable as consultants than as a source of financing, he said.
The EBRD started its annual meeting on May 21 with the launch of a five-year plan to switch investments from new EU member states to South East Europe (SEE) and Russia, Agence France Presse (AFP) reported on May 21.
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, said in opening remarks to delegates, quoted by AFP.
The EBRD operates across 27 countries in SEE, the Baltic states and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS).
Under the new strategy, the bank hopes to reduce by 2010 its presence in eight of the new European Union member states the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia.
Instead, the EBRD will re-allocate more resources to Russia and to SEE where countries including Bulgaria and Romania are candidating for EU membership.
This strategic vantage point envisages for the first time that a number of our countries in the next five years will graduate. That means the job of the transition to market economy and democracy will be complete, Kaempfer said.
The EBRD, which was founded in 1991 to assist the transition of former communist nations to market economies, invests just under four billion euro each year across the region in which it operates.
We expect that in coming years substantially all of this will be to the east and to the south, Kaempfer said.
The EBRD announced at its annual meeting that it was launching its Sustainable Energy Initiative in a bid to address the issue of energy waste and security, climate change and the need for cleaner sources of energy.
Under the initiative, the bank will invest up to 1.5 billion euro in energy efficiency and renewable and clean energy projects over the next three years.
