Closed on 30/06/2023
* Admissibility date reflects the date the case was officially registered. All other dates pertain to the date in which a stage was completed.
Case Description
Complaint
On 3 March 2019, a CEE Bankwatch Network member submitted a complaint to the EIB Complaints Mechanism (EIB-CM) regarding the African Lion Mining Fund III. The complaint concerns the Bank’s failure to provide a timely reply to her request for documents and information.
Conclusion
The complainant had requested access to documents and information in an email addressed to the Bank on 16 October 2018. She submitted a confirmatory application on 3 February 2019. The EIB formally responded to the complainant’s request for information on 11 April 2019. The Bank’s response exceeded by far the time limits set forth in its Transparency Policy (TP): it took the Bank 120 working days to provide a formal reply to the complainant instead of the 30 working days as indicated in the EIB-TP for exceptional cases. It is the EIB-CM’s view that the arguments of complexity of the request for information and the need for consultation with external third parties cannot be used to fully justify the excessive delay in this case.
Outcome
The EIB-CM proposed some ‘areas for improvement’. When handling requests for information that are considered more complex, the Bank should not hesitate to engage with the applicant and address the different elements of the request for information in several batches if necessary. When it comes to requests for access to environmental information and/or documents that contain such information, such requests shall be handled promptly. In cases when the Bank does not hold the requested environmental information, it should inform the applicant accordingly and as soon as possible. Finally, the EIB-CM suggested that, as part of the forthcoming review of the EIB-TP, the Bank considers the need to develop detailed implementation guidelines for handling more complex cases.
Monitoring
The EIB-CM started to formally monitor implementation of these areas for improvement in the last quarter of 2020. For more than two years, the EIB-CM has been following up with the EIB operational services on the areas for improvement. During this period, the competent EIB operational service provided regular updates about the progress. The competent operational service provided evidence to the EIB-CM that it had taken the necessary internal measures to provide practical guidance to EIB staff, taking into account the revised TP (following its adoption in November 2021) and the lessons learnt from this case. On this basis, the EIB-CM closed the monitoring process for this case at the end of Q2 2023.