Complaint to the European Ombudsman on the European Investment Bank's Transparency Policy

ClientEarth, Bankwatch CEE Network and CounterBalance's (the Applicants)
complaint to the European Ombudsman is twofold, it first challenges the decision
through the EIB-CM to declare inadmissible the original complaint lodged by the
Applicants on 16 February (the ‘original complaint’), whereby they argued that several
provisions of the EIB's new Transparency Policy (TP) did not comply with the relevant
international and European legal framework on access to information, namely with the
Aarhus Convention on access to information, public participation in decision-making
and access to justice in environmental matters (the Aarhus Convention), Regulation
1367/2006 (the "Aarhus Regulation")1 and Regulation 1049/20012. This part of the
present complaint seeks to demonstrate, first, that the inadmissibility decision taken by
the EIB Group is not consistent with the EIB-CM guiding principles and that it
constitutes a clear violation of the EIB-CM rules of procedure.

Second, it relies on the arguments put forward in the original complaint to support its
claim that some of the provisions of the TP adopted by the EIB in March 2015
constitute an instance of illegality and maladministration.