Former EIB president Werner Hoyer under EU corruption investigation

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Werner Hoyer, the European Investment Bank’s former president, is under investigation for corruption, abuse of influence and misappropriation of EU funds, allegations he described as “absurd and unfounded”.

The probe relating to the 72-year old, who led the world’s largest multilateral lender for a dozen years, is being led by the European Public Prosecutor’s Office, which polices the misuse of EU funds.

Hoyer was succeeded last December at the helm of the EIB, which as the EU’s lending arm has more than €500bn of firepower, by Nadia Calviño, a former deputy prime minister of Spain.

“The allegations against me are downright absurd and unfounded,” Hoyer said in response to questions from the Financial Times. “I now expect them to be fully investigated and clarified.”

The German economist and former junior minister added he was “co-operating fully” with the prosecutor’s office and asked the EIB to do likewise.

Three people with knowledge of the investigation said it centred around a compensation payment made to a departing EIB member of staff. Hoyer’s lawyer Nikolaos Gazeas added the former EIB president had signed off on the payment.

Two of the people added Hoyer’s house was searched last month in conjunction with the probe.

Calviño has informed the bank’s management committee that the EPPO was looking into her predecessor, a person with knowledge of the matter said.

Both the EIB and the EPPO are based in Luxembourg and the probe is one of the most high-profile cases undertaken by the prosecutor’s office since it since it started operations in 2021.

But Gazeas described “the legal requirements for starting a criminal investigation by the EPPO” as “very low”.

He added: “It is therefore not unusual in legal terms for the signatory of an agreement to also become a subject in an investigation. My client was never involved in the negotiations surrounding the employee’s departure.”

EU officials are granted immunity from legal proceedings unless it is waived by their institution.

The prosecutor’s office on Monday said the EIB had lifted two former employees’ immunity so they could be investigated for suspected corruption, abuse of influence and misappropriation of EU funds.

Gazeas said Hoyer had “expressly requested that his immunity . . . be waived”.

The second person whose immunity has been lifted is the former EIB employee to whom the payment was made — who has yet to be interviewed by the prosecutor’s office, said one person involved in the investigation.

During his two terms leading the EIB, Hoyer steered it through the aftermath of the Eurozone debt crisis. He positioned it as the world’s greenest multilateral bank by pledging to phase out fossil fuel lending and direct more funding to climate action.

He once described the EIB as growing “more or less undetected in the woods of Luxembourg” over the past six decades.

“I am sometimes surprised that political leaders are not aware what kind of instrument they have in their hands,” he told the FT in 2019. “It’s a political instrument. It serves a political purpose.”

He fiercely guarded the lender’s top credit rating and was reluctant to commit the EIB’s full financial firepower in response to crises ranging from Covid-19 to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

A bank spokesperson declined to comment on whether Hoyer was one of the people under investigation, adding that the EIB would “co-operate fully with the European Public Prosecutor’s Office on this matter as required”.

The EIB will also allow the prosecutor to search its premises and archives in Luxembourg, the EPPO said.

Lifting the two former employees’ immunity “will make it possible to gather all the evidence needed, whether inculpatory or exculpatory, to shed full light on the facts under investigation”, the EPPO added.