The European Investment Bank, the European Union's financing institution, has just advanced a loan for FRF 500 million (ECU 76 million (1)) to Aéroports de Paris (ADP) towards financing construction of a third runway and associated works at Roissy-Charles de Gaulle (CDG) airport.

This project forms part of an investment programme being undertaken by ADP to cope with the constant growth in air traffic in the Paris region, designed to increase total capacity at the airport from 30 million to 55 million passengers per annum.

The new runway will be used principally for landing, freeing the existing nº 2 runway for take-offs. By virtue of a 600-metre extension to this second runway, take-offs will be displaced to the east, thereby reducing noise over residential areas. The works also include improvements to taxiways as well as pollution control measures for runoff water towards the Marne and Seine basins.

This EIB loan falls within the context of the Bank's support for trans-European networks (TENs), of which Roissy-CDG airport forms an important link within the air transport sector. Indeed, the EIB is the leading source of bank finance for TENs. Since 1993, it has made available some ECU 46 billion under this heading, of which 37.8 billion within the European Union, towards funding investment totalling more the ECU 130 billion. For airport infrastructure specifically, loans for an aggregate ECU 1.75 billion have been concluded over the past five years, with recent examples of airport projects financed by the EIB including extension and/or modernisation of Milan-Malpensa, Athens-Spata, Madrid-Barrajas, Copenhagen-Kastrup, Hannover-Langenhagen, Cologne-Bonn and Helsinki-Vantaa airports.

(1) The conversion rates used by the EIB for statistical purposes during the current quarter are those obtaining on 31 March 1998, when ECU 1 = FRF 6.65, GBP 0.64.