State-corporate crime reconsidered: A criminological case study of European Investment Bank lending in the EU

Abstract

In its role as the EU’s financing arm the European Investment Bank (EIB) is an understudied player in Europe’s infrastructure market despite annual lending volumes of nearly €70 billion and its status as the world’s largest international financial institution (Clifton et al, 2017). Not all EIB-financed projects contribute to Europe’s development as per intended and can attract censure from the European Parliament and adverse media coverage. EIB finance for the Castor undersea gas storage plant in Spain, the MOSE and Passante di Mestre projects in the Veneto region of Italy can be characterised in these terms and have been criticised for causing environmental damage and stimulating corruption networks whilst being inconsistent with the bank’s lending criteria and standards. This thesis aims to better understand how the EIB engages in behaviours that are counter to the legal and regulatory frameworks to which it subscribes - conduct which is viewed as a form of ‘organisational deviance’. In order to support this analysis, the thesis is influenced by two criminological research endeavours (state- corporate crime and crimes of globalization) that, in part, focus on infrastructure projects financed by international financial institutions and therefore overlap significantly with the EIB and its lending activities. However, these bodies of literature remain underdeveloped when addressing the internal processes and organisational settings of the institutions under study that lead to their involvement in financing projects, an inevitable result of the difficulties faced by researchers in accessing such sites. It is at this point where this thesis is positioned. Based on extensive interviewing of EIB officials during fieldwork in Luxembourg in 2016 and 2017, this thesis will track the internal EIB decision making processes that contribute toward it engaging in organisationally deviant behaviour and consequently, it will argue for a reconsideration of the integrated theoretical framework commonly used in the state-corporate crime and crimes of globalization literatures.