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Welcome to a new episode of EU Watchdog Radio.

My name is Hans Van Schare, media officer at Corporate Europe Observatory, also known as CEO. In this episode, I'll be talking to Xavier Sol of the NGO counterbalance, about the realities of the European Union and its development policies.

The EU has a benign and rich superpower that is the biggest donor in the world. The EU indeed continues to spend billions of euros on development policy.

And more and more of these money flows will be steered through development banks and the private sector,

in the belief that huge investments will create growth and prosperity.

Unfortunately, it seems that a lot of EU policy makers still are stuck in outdated neoliberal fairy tales,

like Crickle Down Economy.

The idea that if you let big business invest and finance huge projects,

that this will in the end help poor communities.

This week starts in Paris the very first Finance in Common Summit,

where hundreds of development banks around the world get together for a gathering that will become an annual conference.

The biggest of them all, the European Investment Bank, or EIB, will be shining at this summit

as a sort of leader in terms of climate and sustainable development goals or SDGs.

But the big question is if this image is justified.

At the start of this summit in Paris, the NGO counterbalance publishes a flagship report called

Can the EIB become the EU Development Bank, a critical view on the EIB operations outside Europe.

It seems that the EIB wants to become indeed the EU Development Bank after being already troned as the EU Climate Bank, but that it is simply

not up to the task.

On paper, the EIB policies and due diligence procedures seems great, but in reality they

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