The Bank has no formal system for tracking the project selection process. This makes it difficult to confirm the degree of selectivity. It would therefore be useful if the Preliminary Information Note (PIN), the successor to the Relevé Quotidien (RQ), were to summarise the history of the Bank's involvement to date. The people involved in projects had often forgotten how the EIB had originally got involved, or had inconsistent recollections. Synthesising the various comments suggested that there were three main routes:
• Through existing contacts with, e.g. central government, and the selection of the most appropriate projects from a portfolio of available projects. It is not the Bank's role to promote or develop projects in isolation or on behalf of third parties, and this approach allows the Bank to select projects which are the most appropriate fit with its Corporate Operational Plan.
• Through an approach from the Promoter at some stage during the procurement process; this commonly led to the Bank providing financing proposals to the final bidders to be incorporated into their bids (cf. §5.2)
• Through an approach from the winning bidder (Provider)
The second and third approaches suggest that lending was reactive to requests, rather than proactive in seeking to maximise policy impact. However, the Bank was selective and did not accept all projects offered. The Bank has little to contribute at the project definition stage, particularly when it is dealing with competent Promoters. On the other hand, suggestions were made to change the structure of a motorway project which would have increased its viability - but the Promoter did not accept them.
The projects' eligibility for Bank finance was normally based on either or both of section (a) or section (c) of Art. 267 (formerly Art. 198) of the Treaty of Rome, i.e. that the project was in a Objective 1 or 2 development area, and/or that it related to a Trans-European Network (TENs) route (in the case of roads), or produced specific environmental benefits.
In a number of the projects evaluated in-depth, the project boundaries were larger than the PPP Contract. In the case of an urban motorway, land acquisition and ancillary works being undertaken by the state were included as part of the overall project, while on a second motorway, loans to the Promoter for one section of the road, and to the Provider for another, were initially dealt with as one application, although actually appraised separately by PJ. For a rail project, the costs of additional works undertaken by the state were correctly included when calculating the EIRR and excluded when calculating the limit on the EIB's contribution to the contract.