Odile Renaud-Basso, Deputy CEO and Director of Savings Funds at the Caisse des Dépôts Group, Anita Fürstenberg, Director for Lending Operations in Western Europe at the European Investment Bank (EIB), and Dominique Peljak, Director of Centre Hospitalier de Melun, today signed finance contracts totalling €121m for the reconstruction of Centre Hospitalier de Melun.
This is the first joint financing operation by EIB and Caisse des Dépôts for a hospital project in Île-de-France, approved by the Inter-ministerial Committee for Performance and Upgrading of Hospital Care Supply (Copermo).
Centre Hospitalier de Melun already has excellent technical facilities and is the headquarters of the emergency medical services (SAMU) for the Seine-et-Marne department. The reconstruction operation will involve centralising within the same complex the activities of both the public healthcare institution and the Saint-Jean l’Ermitage private clinic, which was created in 2005 following the merger of the Saint-Jean polyclinic in Melun with the L’Ermitage private clinic in Dammarie-les-Lys. This will result in the establishment of a unique public-private hospital complex in France, in which the medical, medico-technical and logistical activities will be shared.
This joint EIB/Caisse des Dépôts financing operation will meet virtually all long-term borrowing requirements for the construction of the public part of the new Melun hospital complex – whose total cost is estimated at around €200m – on favourable financial terms for the borrower. The financial contribution amounts to €70m for the EIB and €50.3m for Caisse des Dépôts.
Caisse des Dépôts is providing a €50.3m savings fund loan out of the €20bn budget that it has earmarked for the local public sector over the period 2015-2017. Caisse des Dépôts is financing a number of projects intended to improve public services via savings fund loans. The signature of the loan for the reconstruction of Centre Hospitalier de Melun is consistent with Caisse des Dépôts' fulfilment of its public interest remits.
For the European Union's bank, this loan forms part of its priority action to support quality public services that can meet the people's needs in the heart of the regions. Accordingly, since 2013 the EIB has decided to devote €6bn a year to infrastructure upgrading in France. In the healthcare sector, in addition to direct loans to hospital complexes such as Centre Hospitalier de Melun, the EIB has established itself as a key partner of the "Hôpital Avenir" (Hospitals of the Future) national programme with a financial commitment of €1.5bn.
This finance contract under the partnership between the EIB and Caisse des Dépôts, launched in June 2013 and reinforced in October 2014, is designed to coordinate their activities and skills and harness the Caisse des Dépôts network to meet as efficiently as possible the financing needs of public sector players in their economic and social development projects.