By Toby McIntosh
The European Investment Bank has again refused to disclose the minutes of a 2023 meeting about the GEMs database.
In declining to release any portion of the 16-pages of meeting minutes, the EIB followed the directions of the GEMs Steering Committee, not the EIB’s Transparency Policy.
Also, the EIB ignored guidance from the EIB Complaints Mechanism to release any portions of the minutes not covered by exemptions in the Transparency Policy.
Eye on Global Transparency, which made the request to see the minutes almost two years ago, has appealed the denial to the EU Ombudsman, which was already looking into the EIB’s delay in the matter.
The requested minutes concern the Global Emerging Markets (GEMs) Consortium – General Assembly Annual Meeting held in 2023. At the time, the lack of transparency of the GEMs database was a hot topic.
The GEMs database contains information from 27 multilateral development banks and development finance institutions about their investments in emerging markets and developing economies.
Representatives of the member institutions meet twice a year, at the beginning of the year for a Working Group Annual Meeting and mid-year for a General Assembly Annual Meeting. Also, a seven-person Steering Committee “defines the strategic and operational priorities.” No meeting minutes are disclosed.
At the time of the 2023 General Assembly Annual Meeting, many voices in the private sector and non-profit world were urging more transparency about GEMs data. They argued that more granular data would show that the risks of investments were lower than widely perceived and that this information would trigger more investment.
Since then, GEMs has released more information, with some evidence of the predicted benefits. (See EYE article, Oct. 22, 2025.)
The “persistence” of pro-transparency forces “ paid off,” according to a Dec. 2 article by Karen Mathiasen and Niko Martinez, published by the Center for Global Development. They chronicle the campaign and the positive results, while still saying that reducing the scope of the non-disclosure clauses in contracts would “enable even more fulsome datasets going forward.”
Back in 2023, decisions about GEMs transparency were being made.
EYE’s Dec. 18, 2023, request for the minutes was totally denied by the EIB on Jan. 26, 2024. EYE on April 29, 2024, appealed through the Complaints Mechanism, an internal EIB appeals body, which issued its Conclusions Report a year later, on April 25, 2025, recommending that the EIB reconsider its reply and redact only those portions of the minutes covered by the Transparency Policy. (See EYE article, May 12, 2025.)
Six months later, in a Nov. 14 letter, the EIB did release portions of a one-page summary of the meeting, after getting the Steering Committee’s approval. The EIB made four redactions to the summary.
But the EIB withheld the minutes in full.
Steering Committee, Secret Document, Prevent Disclosure
The EIB said the GEMs Steering Committee “refused consent to disclose the remainder of the document at issue.”
The secrecy was necessitated in part by the GEMS “Cooperation Agreement,” a nonpublic document, the EIB said. EYE has unsuccessfully asked the EIB to provide a copy of the agreement.
In appealing the decision to the EU Ombudsman, EYE wrote: “It is clear … that EIB has ceded decision-making over the release of the requested minutes to the Steering Committee.” This is in “direct conflict with the EIB Transparency Policy and European Union Law, EYE said in its appeal.
EYE also questioned the eight justifications used by the Steering Committee.
Claims that confidential and proprietary information would be disclosed are vague and could be resolved by appropriate redactions, EYE said.
EYE questioned the Steering Committee’s concern that “references to members’ positions, projects, and practices, could cause harm to members.”
EYE replied:
Minutes typically contain just this sort of information. What members say, about what, and how they vote is the common substance of minutes and why they are valuable. The EIB has provided no proof that disclosure would “cause harm to members.”
The Steering Committee also held that information in the minutes might allow “unauthorized actors,” using artificial intelligence, “to further disaggregate or identify some of the GEMs data that the consortium makes publicly available thereby causing harm to GEMs members.”
EYE called this “a very ambiguous claim.” It, like the other Steering Committee justifications, were not tied to exemptions in the EIB Transparency Policy.
EYE said that the EIB should follow its own Transparency Policy, and make redactions if justified, but not follow the Steering Committee’s opinions.
Curiously, the EIB’s reply came on the same deadline, Nov 14, that the EU Ombudsman had given the EIB to explain why the matter was taking so long.
