Mr. Andrew McDowell:

This issue is obviously taking up a great deal of management time in the bank. At the end of the day, the post-Brexit relationship between the EIB and the UK will not be a matter for the bank; it will be a matter for the Barnier team and the European Council to agree as part of the UK withdrawal agreement. Our working assumption is that the United Kingdom will exit as a shareholder in March 2019.

Under the treaties currently, it states that the shareholders of the European Investment Bank, EIB, shall be the members of the European Union. By corollary we are working to the assumption that the UK will exit. That will have a significant impact on the bank. The UK has 16% of the share capital of the bank and it has paid in share capital of €3.6 billion. The position of the European Union as expressed in the Commission's negotiating guidelines is that the UK will be repaid its paid-in share capital but only over the lifetime of the obligations that the bank has incurred using that share capital. Basically, the bank uses the share capital of every member state to underpin its borrowings and we have outstanding bond liabilities of approximately €480 billion, which will mature over 30 to 35 years. Every country's share capital underpins that. It is the position of the European that the UK will be entitled to get that money back but only as those obligations of the bank expire over a long period. The UK also has guarantees to the EIB that will also diminish over time as our obligations expire. That is the negotiating position of the European Union.

Once the UK is no longer a member, its share capital in the bank would cease to be share capital in the bank and its callable capital in the bank would no longer be callable. The bank will have an issue to deal with in terms of the statutory limits imposed on the bank regarding how much it can lend as against the amount of capital it has. We are in discussions with the 27 remaining shareholders about ensuring that Britain's exit does not damage the bank's ability to do its job in those 27 member states. As the members can imagine, we will start getting more questions from rating agencies on our AAA rating and institutional investors about the extent to which Brexit is going to affect the bank's capital strength. We certainly feel it would be a good idea for the other 27 member states, even before agreeing the details of how they ensure the bank's capital structure remains strong, to articulate a statement of support for the EIB that Brexit will not be allowed to damage the bank's ability to do its job in the other 27 member states.