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EBRD, EU and Raiffeisen Bank support small businesses in Poland
€10 million loan to Raiffeisen-leasing Polska helps strengthen Polish SME sector
The EBRD today signed a €10 million loan to Raiffeisen-Leasing Polska S.A., Poland's fifth largest leasing company, and a subsidiary of Raiffeisen Bank, the leading bank in Austria, to support the country's small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The European Union is also providing around €2 million to cover the costs of expanding the company's business into the SME sector, such as staff training, via the Phare Programme.
The loan is being provided through the EU/EBRD SME Finance Facility, a programme of the EC in cooperation with the EBRD to facilitate the access to finance of small and medium-sized enterprises and to promote SME growth and development. This is the first loan under the Facility by the Bank to a leasing company in the region.
Kurt Geiger, Business Group Director, Financial Institutions at the EBRD, said this loan will help SMEs in Poland compete in an increasingly open market. He said small businesses in Poland need access to reliable, and medium-term funding, and that projects like this will help them achieve just that. Mr Geiger added that the Bank is pleased to be working with Raiffeisen Leasing and Raiffeisen Bank to help develop these engines of growth in Poland.
Hanna Gronkiewicz-Waltz will sign the agreement on behalf of the EBRD.
"Thanks to the new opportunities arising from our co-operation with EBRD, Polish entrepreneurs will receive access to new financing sources, with simpler and faster application procedures", said Arkadiusz Etryk, President of Raiffeisen-Leasing Polska S.A.
The SME Facility was launched on April 1999 under the Phare Programme of the European Commission, with the EBRD, to encourage the growth and development of SMEs by facilitating their access to loans, leasing and equity finance from local financial intermediaries in the candidate countries.
The Phare Programme is one of main channels for the European Union's financial and technical cooperation with the candidate countries of central and eastern Europe. The budget earmarked for the Phare Programme as a whole is about €1.5 billion a year. Over the period 1990-2002 Phare provided assistance to Poland of EUR 3.5 billion.
This is the EBRD's second loan to Raiffeisen Group to support SMEs in Poland in just six months, following a €10 million loan to Raiffeisen Bank Polska in May 2002. To date the EBRD has provided around €130 million to SMEs in Poland.
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