More than €70 million grants and €850 million investments in infrastructure, transport and energy projects have been attracted to Moldova through the Neighborhood Investment Facility since 2008. In a roundtable meeting, Project Manager at the EU Delegation to Moldova Alexandre Darras said that this mechanism for mobilizing the European funds for Moldova is not known by the country’s people, IPN reports.
The purpose of the Neighborhood Investment Facility is to pool resources from the European Commission and EU member states and use them to leverage loans from European finance institutions and the EU member states. This mechanism, by its grant component, improved access to financing for investments.
Alexandre Darras said that on the one hand, this facility is used to finance infrastructure projects, while on the other hand to facilitate the obtaining of loans by small and medium-sized companies. The mechanism starts to be applied when the central or local authorities from the beneficiary country, like Moldova, work out a project and submit it to the EBRD or the EIB for financing, while those from the baking institutions are considering whether the EU can participate with a grant component for making the project more efficient.
Octavian Costas, senor banker at the EBRD Representative Office in Chisinau, said that since 1994, when the EBRD started to cooperate with Moldova, the bank has financed over 100 projects. The money from the EBRD helped to purchase new trolleybuses for Chisinau and to rehabilitate streets and electricity and water supply networks. In the future, the bank plans to finance the restructuring of Moldova’s Railways.
Marion Hoenicke, head of the EIB Lending Operations in Moldova and Ukraine Division, said the EIB approves of the permissive function of the financing offered by the Neighborhood Investment Facility in Moldova, where 80% of the projects were co-financed by the bank.
The participants in the roundtable meeting said there will be financed new projects to organize professional training courses for workers as Moldova experiences a shortage of skilled workers so that the companies that perform works here have to bring workers from other countries.
