EIB President Philippe Maystadt and Vice-President Simon Brooks met Mr Jonas Moberg, Head of the Secretariat of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), on 14th October in Luxembourg, to discuss further ways to strengthen and continue to mainstream EITI processes and considerations into the Bank’s activities.

EITI is a coalition of governments, companies, civil society groups, investors and international organisations set up to encourage and assist resource-rich countries to improve governance by strengthening transparency and accountability over natural resource revenues.

The EIB, whose mandate includes support to the European Union’s (EU) development cooperation policies in many regions outside the EU Member States, has publicly endorsed and supports the EITI and its objectives since February 2008.

As part of the Bank’s internal awareness building programme, Mr Moberg also met with Bank staff involved in mining and other extracting industries projects to exchange experiences and discuss processes, with the aim to develop specific measures that could be used by both parties and in particular strengthen the Bank’s contribution in this field.

While EITI principles mostly target companies and countries (see: http://eitransparency.org/), the EIB is committed to support EITI’s work in resource-rich countries outside the EU in which the Bank operates, in particular by working with its project sponsors to introduce greater transparency and consistency in reporting on payments at a project level. At the same time, the EIB will continue to promote the initiative in its contacts with governments and national authorities and encourage them to adopt the EITI principles for reporting and publishing extractive industry revenues. EIB is also more generally supporting the work of the EITI International Secretariat based in Oslo.

The meeting held in Luxembourg represents a concrete follow-up to the EITI roundtable on Donor Coordination held in Madrid on 26 May 2008, which underlined the need to strengthen cooperation on common issues related to project processes between the EIB and other International Finance Institutions (“IFIs”) with the support of EITI. The Bank will further discuss these issues at the EITI conference on the role of IFIs to be held in Athens later this month.