The Institut Català de Finances (ICF) has become “the main and only financier” of the social housing projects that are being promoted on public land in Catalonia, according to the entity’s CEO, Vanessa Servera.
Specifically, he assured, the ICF has already received 115 million euros from the Development Bank of the Council of Europe, which has already allocated and is finalizing negotiations with the European Investment Bank (EIB), chaired by the former Minister of Economy Nadia Calviño, to obtain a macrocredit of 500 million euros, which it hopes to close in the coming months. “We are in the processing process, but it takes a while,” she acknowledged.
Servera pointed out that the Institute’s credits for public works and social housing reached 62.6 million euros last year, 10.5% more than in 2022, in 49 operations, but that this figure will increase exponentially in 2024 and 2025 , when the projects that the Catalan municipalities are now bidding for are awarded and the works begin.
Yesterday Servera presented the public institute’s accounts for 2023, a year in which it increased investment in loans and risk capital by 17% in 2023, up to 641 million euros, of which 597.2 million were new loans (with an increase of 25%). Investments in venture capital, for their part, were reduced by 35%, to 43.8 million euros, “because the ICF acts as a co-investor in most operations and in 2023 financial activity in the sector was reduced” .
With the new activity, the ICF’s credit portfolio closed the year at 2,245 million, 0.7% more compared to the 4% drop in the financial system as a whole, with a 7.1% delinquency rate, 0.4 points percentages less. The net result, for its part, grew by 83.7% to 49.5 million, driven by the rise in interest rates. This, Servera assured, allowed the ICF to improve its solvency, which stands at 38.4%, double the sector average, and gives it access to more credits and lower interest rates.
Servera explained that the star activity of the ICF last year was the liquidity line for the agricultural sector, which granted 77 million euros to 1,236 SMEs and self-employed workers in the sector, especially farmers and ranchers, to help them alleviate the effects of the drought and of the increase in raw material costs. Initially, the ICF plans to allocate 55 million more to this group this year, a figure that assumes that it will increase but that depends on the Department of Climate Action of the Generalitat, which subsidizes 2% of the interest on the credits, which range from 10,000 to 100,000 euros.
