The European Investment Bank (EIB) in Luxembourg lends EUR 200 million to (Przedsiebiortwo 'Porty Lotnicze' (PPL), the State enterprise 'Polish Airports' for co-financing a new passenger terminal and associated airside and landside work at Warsaw International Airport. The new terminal will provide capacity for an additional 6.5 million passengers per year thus increasing the airport's overall capacity to approximately 10 million passengers, to deal with expected growth up to at least 2010.
With a EUR 50 million loan to PPL granted in 1992 EIB helped upgrade Terminal I at Warsaw International and associated infrastructure, to increase capacity at to 3 million passengers. Passenger traffic, however, has grown at rates exceeding forecasts since, reaching 4.7 million passengers/year in 2001 and is expected to increase to almost 6.3 million by 2005 and 9.4 million by 2010. Although the airport has dealt well with the excess traffic so far, it needs to be expanded urgently to meet current and forecast traffic levels.
Commenting on the loan, EIB-Vice President Roth said: 'The expansion co-financed with the new EIB loan will enable the airport to meet existing and rapidly rising demand for air transport in Poland, as the country's economy develops. In so doing the project will contribute to Poland's integration to the EU, and to strengthening transport links between the EU and Poland within the TEN network.'
Since the beginning of 2002 EIB has lent well over EUR 1 billion for projects in Poland. Nearly two thirds of the amount went to transport schemes with the rest going to environment, energy and industry projects.
The European Investment Bank (EIB), Luxembourg, is the European Union's house bank for financing long-term capital investment projects. While the bulk of its loans regularly go to projects in the EU -especially in its lesser developed regions, the Bank's activities in the Accession Countries is growing fast and has already reached some 10 per cent of its lending volume. In addition to its main activities concentrated in the present and future EU Countries, EIB may also finance projects - although on a a more limited scale - in some 150 developing countries around the world, which have cooperation agreements with the EU. EIB is the largest multilateral bank and raises on the world's capital markets most of the funds needed for its lending