Andria (PPE-DE). – (IT) Mr President, Commissioner, President of the EBRD, ladies and gentlemen, first of all, allow me to offer my congratulations to the rapporteur on his careful analysis of the EBRD’s activities. The choice of economic activities must combine the local dimension with the international and requires a supply of credit not only to encourage the emergence of initiatives that are well established within a country but also to help them spread to other markets. It is certainly the job of the EBRD to do this, but it is even more important to try to do it in countries with little industrial development, which have a greater need for support and revitalisation. If, in order to achieve this objective, it needs to take risks and, in some cases, accept unexpected losses, it must not then cut out initiatives and planned investments but rather benefit from new experiences so that it can manage lending more attentively and read the risks more carefully.

This bank takes an ethical approach to credit management. Its institutional commitment is to invest in any country that is inspired by democratic principles and determined to promote a market economy. The first time, the bank asks clients for valid projects, with current market prices; it also requires that there should be no conflicts of interest or dominant positions in the operational area to be financed, and that the interests of the local community should always be respected. In the public sector, the EBRD calls for the greatest transparency to be employed in order to ensure competition and equal treatment for the market players. We welcome and support the rapporteur’s views when he urges the EBRD to support small local banks, which, in turn, should focus on small–scale lending.

At this point, Mr President, allow me to sound an alarm: small bank lending is disappearing or is being considerably cut back. This is a matter for concern, because no economic or financial manoeuvre, however good it may be, could replace the support that small banks have always offered to small and medium–sized enterprises.

We must also note that small–scale lending in many Member States and particularly the accession states is being thoroughly neglected; that leads to a daily increase in financial exclusion, which is the existence of serious gaps in the supply of small–scale credit services in the countries with the weakest economies, where a form of discrimination based on geographical criteria arises: red–lining. It is up to the EBRD, which has already chosen to operate in countries such as Albania, Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Moldova, to help to integrate these disadvantaged economies fully into the international economic order.