>@La Comunidad de Madrid
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  • EIB financing will go towards the Community of Madrid's vaccination programme and health costs and the purchase of medical supplies.
  • The EU bank is providing this financing as part of its package of measures to help EU Member States to address the pandemic.

The European Investment Bank (EIB) is set to increase its support for the Community of Madrid to help it to meet to the economic challenges caused by the pandemic. The EU bank will provide €200 million to the region on favourable and long-term conditions, in addition to the €600 million made available in May 2020 to deal with the COVID-19 health crisis.

In particular, these new EIB funds will help to support both the Community of Madrid's COVID-19 vaccination programme and the extraordinary operational costs caused by the virus, as well as the purchase of medical supplies and protective equipment related to the vaccination campaign.

To help Spain combat the first wave of infections and prepare to fight the pandemic, the EIB granted €600 million to the Community of Madrid in April 2020, followed by a further €50 million to the Autonomous Community of Navarre and €80 million to the Xunta de Galicia.

The €200 million in new financing being provided to the Community of Madrid is part of the extraordinary measures the EIB has taken to speed up its processes and make its internal policies more flexible in order to – among other things – deploy its support as quickly as possible and finance expenses that it would not normally cover, such as the operating costs of businesses and the extraordinary expenditure of public authorities.

In Spain, as in the rest of the European Union, COVID-19 is having a major impact on the health sector. For this reason, the European Investment Bank continues to bolster the health response to this crisis, supporting the Community of Madrid's vaccination campaign and providing funding to enable it to purchase medical supplies and protective equipment to end the pandemic. The health sector is more important now than ever,” stressed EIB Vice-President Ricardo Mourinho Félix, who is responsible for the Bank’s operations in Spain.

To this end, Madrid's Minister of Finance, Javier Fernández-Lasquetty, wanted to thank the EIB for its support, and said, “the Community of Madrid is facing the worst health crisis in its history. This requires an extraordinary budgetary effort, since it is the autonomous communities that are fighting this battle in hospitals, and those that are taking measures to relaunch the economy.”

Background information:

The measures taken by the EIB to mitigate the effects of the pandemic are focused on two main areas: supporting the healthcare sector and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). With these objectives in mind, in 2020 the EIB Group signed 46 operations in Spain worth a total of €4.9 billion, and has approved operations worth €12.1 billion, making Spain the country with the largest volume of financing approved for projects related to COVID-19.

More detailed information on the support offered by the EIB and EIF