The recent Communication from the Commission to the European Parliament, the Council, the European Economic and Social Committee, the Committee of the Regions and the National Parliaments - The EU Budget Review of 19 October 2010 (the EU Budget Review Commission Communication) states:
"The impact of the EU budget can be magnified the more it can be used to leverage both funding and financing to support strategic investments with the highest European added value. Innovative financial instruments could provide an important new financing stream for strategic investments. The norm for projects with long-term commercial potential should be that EU Funds are used in partnership with the private and banking sectors […] The Commission and the EIB have already successfully developed a number of common financial instruments. Blending between grants from the EU budget and loans from the EIB and other financial institutions has made it possible to treble the financial impact of EU external spending by attracting huge multiples of investment from financial institutions. This should be extended to become the norm in areas of long-term commercial potential, with new rules to govern blended instruments."
PPPs are structures that rely to a great extent on private finance and as such are prime candidates for blending between grants from the EU budget and loans from financial institutions. The overview of current ways of combining EU Funds and PPPs presented in this paper and the experience under the current Financial Perspective point towards the following conclusions: