Split: Croatian rail planners spent years arguing that the line north toward Hungary deserved money rather than sympathy. On 27 August the European Investment Bank’s board agreed, folding the link into a package worth 9.2 billion euros that also covers hospitals in France and Poland, solar capacity in Italy, district heating in Lithuania and transmission grids in Germany and Greece.

The headline number matters less than where the largest slice lands. Roughly 4.3 billion euros will not reach a single named project at all. It goes to commercial banks in Croatia, Czechia, France, Greece, Italy, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Spain, which then lend it onward to smaller companies. The bank calls this intermediated lending. In practice it means the EIB has decided that local credit officers can pick winners among small firms better than Luxembourg can.

That choice carries a trade-off the bank rarely spells out. Intermediated lending moves money fast and reaches firms too small to negotiate directly with a multilateral lender. It also blurs accountability. When a direct loan finances a bridge, anyone can inspect the bridge. When 4.3 billion euros disperses through nine banking systems into thousands of loans, the audit trail thins considerably, and the additionality question becomes genuinely hard to answer.

The bank steered this tranche toward security and defence, aerospace, energy and agriculture. Defence financing represents the sharper break with tradition. The EIB spent decades treating anything military as outside its remit, then loosened its dual-use definitions as governments pressed it to help fund rearmament. Each package since has pushed a little further into territory the bank once refused, and the shareholders applauding that shift are the same governments seeking the loans.

Set against the group’s declared target of 100 billion euros a year, a single board meeting worth 9.2 billion looks routine. It is not quite routine in composition. Grid financing in Germany and Greece speaks to a bottleneck that regulators keep naming as the binding constraint on the energy transition. Solar developers can build faster than network operators can connect them, and cheap long-tenor debt for wires addresses a problem that subsidies for panels cannot touch.

What the package does not do is close Europe’s equity gap. Fast-growing firms in the bloc still meet a wall when they need risk capital rather than debt, and they still cross the Atlantic to find it. Bank loans, however cheap, do not substitute for that. The full list sits in the EIB board announcement.