slovenia case studies

Signed projects

Board approval is the final stage in the project approval process. After Board approval, the EBRD and the client sign the deal and it becomes legally binding. Signed project lists reflect year-end data.

Signed projects  (0.1Mb)

Case studies

Supporting small municipalities in Slovenia

An EBRD loan of €10 million to Abanka, Slovenia’s third largest bank, will finance small municipalities, municipal companies and private companies providing municipal services. The finance will increase the borrowing capacities of municipalities and allow them to make urgently needed infrastructure investments.

With a territory of 20,273 square kilometres Slovenia is among the smaller countries in Europe, its size being roughly the same as Wales or half the size of Switzerland. The country is divided into 205 municipalities of which 186 have fewer than 20,000 inhabitants.

Many small municipalities were only created in recent years and have small budgets for building and maintaining their relevant infrastructure. It is here that the EBRD loan will make a big difference by providing long-term finance that was previously unavailable in the form of credits with maturities of more than 10 years.

The EBRD finance comes under the EU/EBRD Municipal Finance Framework which has been designed to assist small municipalities with fewer than 100,000 inhabitants with loans for infrastructure investments. The loan to Abanka will be complemented by a €1.6 million grant from the European Union for technical assistance.

The EU/EBRD Municipal Finance Facility is a joint initiative by the EBRD and the European Commission (EC) to stimulate commercial bank lending to small and medium-sized municipalities in the new EU countries. The €175 million facility aims to address the shortage of long-term finance available to small cities and towns. The EC, through the PHARE Programme is also providing financial and technical cooperation funds to help municipalities to prepare viable projects.