🇪🇺 Europe wants investment & Ukraine to recover? My advice: remove barriers to private sector investment!
The economic recovery and reconstruction of Ukraine are rightly EU priorities. Yet precisely where private capital is most needed, we let regulatory obstacles exist.
📉 Capital requirements for example under FRTB make it significantly harder to finance local subsidiaries and disproportionately penalize investments in non-euro countries like Ukraine.
❌ The lack of third-country equivalence for Ukraine’s banking supervision means that EU banks face higher capital charges when financing Ukrainian projects, a de facto deterrent, even in the case of sound business models and trusted local partners.
⚠️ The result: capital is not flowing where it’s most strategically needed despite geopolitical commitments and the proven resilience of Ukraine’s economy and banking sector.
What is needed now:
- Realistic risk assessments and regulatory differentiation
- Risk-mitigation with an EU backbone (e.g. via EIB/EBRD)
- Third-country equivalence for Ukraine under CRR
- Enabling, not penalizing, strategic investment
Europe needs more than political declarations, it needs the right framework to incentivize private investment. That too is part of being a geopolitically capable Union.