The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) will highlight a shift in its attention from central Europe towards the east, when it meets this weekend in Russia.
Its two-day annual assembly, being held alongside an economic forum, is being staged from Sunday at Kazan, the capital of Tatarstan, a Russian republic around 800 kilometers (490 miles) to the east of Moscow. The London-based EBRD, founded in 1991 to assist the transition of former communist nations to market economies, currently operates mainly in eastern Europe and central Asia.
In recent years, it has switched its attention to investing in south-eastern Europe and Russia and away from central Europe, where ex-Soviet states are now members of the wealthy European Union bloc. It is meeting for the second time in Russia after Saint Petersburg in 1994.
Its choice of Kazan is symbolic, as it illustrates a wish to move away from the big Russian urban centres, while lavishing attention on a town which has become a success story in economic and cultural terms, being 51 percent populated by Muslim Tatars and 41 percent by Russians, the EBRD said.
The meeting will be preceded by a forum devoted to the economy of Tatarstan, an oil rich region and a base for diverse industries, including chemicals, wood and machinery. At its annual assembly in 2006 in London the EBRD announced its progressive withdrawal by 2010 from eight countries which it had helped achieve market economies since 1991.
The Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia all became members of the European Union on May 1, 2004 are now considered to have "sufficiently solid" markets and an access "to other sources of financing", EBRD spokeswoman Brigid Janssen told AFP. The Czech Republic will be the first country to lose the EBRD's services this year, she said.
The resources thus freed up with be redeployed eastwards and southwards to other countries where the EBRD is active: the Balkans, central Asia and Russia, especially its regions. Mongolia was also accepted in 2006 as a beneficiary country. A major part of the debates in Kazan will be devoted to Russia, its economy and its relations with the rest of the world at a time of deep strains between Moscow and the European Union.
The bank says it is not "blind to the context" but that this does not hinder its work and its backing for Russian membership of the World Trade Organisation and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development.
The EBRD's success in eastern European countries has given rise to another issue: what to do with the 2.4 billion euros (3.2 billion dollars) of net earnings raised in 2006, which was boosted by gains from stock investments.
Three solutions are being mulled, Janssen said: strengthening reserves, redistributing the surplus to shareholders and creating a special fund devoted to "technical cooperation", attributing funds which have little chance of returns.