Bank on it

The EBRD’s annual gathering in Riga next month shows that there is a great deal of life left in what critics often dismiss as talking shops. Tomas Kairys, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development’s head of the Baltic states, told reporters in February that the Bank had invested a record 654 million euros across the three Baltic countries in 2025. Latvia took 160 million euros of that, spread over 13 projects, the highest annual figure the EBRD has ever put into the country.

The timing was not accidental. From June 5 to 7, Riga will host the EBRD’s 35th Annual Meeting and Business Forum, with more than 2,000 delegates expected on the banks of the Daugava. Arvils Ašeradens, Latvia’s finance minister signed the host-country memorandum with the Bank’s secretary general, Kazuhiko Koguchi, in May 2025. The Bank’s recent rotation tells its own story: Marrakech in 2022, Samarkand in 2023, Yerevan in 2024 (where Odile Renaud-Basso was re-elected to a second term as president), London in 2025 for the 35th anniversary meeting, and now the Baltics. Across all its regions, the EBRD put a record 16.8 billion euros to work in 2025, of which 9.4 billion euros supported the green transition and 75 per cent went to the private sector. These are the numbers that explain why the meetings still happen at all. Annual gatherings of multilateral lenders are where governors approve country strategies, donor pledges are renewed, capital increases are ratified, and successor presidents are elected. Renaud-Basso said in February that the EBRD had deployed a record 2.9 billion euros in Ukraine in 2025, taking the total since February 2022 to 9.1 billion euros. That figure rests on a four billion euros paid-in capital increase that governors approved in May 2023 at the Samarkand meeting. Without the meeting, there is no vote, and without the vote, there is no money. Scott Bessent, America’s treasury secretary, used a speech last April to the Institute of International Finance, held alongside the International Monetary Fund and World Bank Spring Meetings, to accuse both institutions of “mission creep” and of having been “knocked off course”. He came back to the theme in October at the IMF-World Bank annual gathering in Washington, telling reporters that the IMF should sell a Maryland golf course it owns and stop “dalliance in these climate policies or social engineering”.

Key points

• The timing was not accidental.
• From June 5 to 7, Riga will host the EBRD’s 35th Annual Meeting and Business Forum, with more than 2,000 delegates expected on the banks of the Daugava.
• Arvils Ašeradens, Latvia’s finance minister signed the host-country memorandum with the Bank’s secretary general, Kazuhiko Koguchi, in May 2025.
• The Bank’s recent rotation tells its own story: Marrakech in 2022, Samarkand in 2023, Yerevan in 2024 (where Odile Renaud-Basso was re-elected to a second term as president), London in 2025 for the…
• Across all its regions, the EBRD put a record 16.8 billion euros to work in 2025, of which 9.4 billion euros supported the green transition and 75 per cent went to the private sector.