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You're listening to EU Watchdog Radio.

Welcome to the very first episode of this new podcast series called EU Watchdog Radio.

It's hosted by two Brussels-based NGOs, Counterbalance and corporate Europe observatory.

My name is Hans van Schagen. I'm a media officer at CEO. And my very first guest is Savier Sol of

counterbalance. Welcome, Xavier. Here we are post-Brexit episode of the European Union and we are

both non-English speakers and we're speaking

in English. But this aside, first of all, could you explain to us what is counterbalance

doing in real life? So, I mean, first of all, we are a coalition of nine NGOs that are active all around Europe.

These are associations working on environment, development and financial issues.

And basically, they decided at the end of the 2000s to set up a campaign to work on the European Union public finance.

And as counterbalance, we are created as a campaign on the European Investment Bank,

so a large public bank in Europe, to push for a reform of that bank.

And that was the end of the 2000s.

So since more than a decade, we are here based in Brussels, we have a a small secretariat trying to move things on the public finance side.

Right, so you are like the spider in the web of a sort of European network of organizations that want to improve European finance.

Now, you just said it, the main focus of counterbalance is the European Investment Bank.

Yes.

I'm sure that a lot of listeners outside of the European bubble have never even heard about the EIB,

as it's called, in short. Can you explain what is the EIB for a creature?

It's normal that most of European citizens haven't heard about it because it's not a very famous institution. I mean, some people know about the World Bank, for example, but not so much about the European Investment Bank, this so-called EIB.

Still, the reason why we focus on it is that it's the largest multilateral public bank in the world.

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