One of the FEU's priority tasks is to facilitate Ukrainian enterprises' access to mechanisms that provide favourable financing conditions for their modernization and technological upgrading.
Moreover, our objective is not only to apply existing mechanisms but also to create new support programmes for Ukrainian businesses to acquire critically important equipment.
This became the main topic of the first meeting with Italy’s export credit agency SACE. The agency already has experience working with Ukraine, both in cooperation with the Ukrainian Government and in supporting private sector projects — in particular, the export of Italian agricultural machinery to Ukraine.
We discussed in detail the prospects and financial support instruments that SACE can provide for the procurement of Italian equipment for Ukrainian industry, including within the framework of the “Industrial Ramstein” initiative, as it is now critically important for Ukraine to support the import not of finished products but of technologies and production tools that contribute to value creation within the country.
SACE already has a number of instruments capable of reducing the cost and improving the terms of obtaining Italian equipment for Ukrainian businesses. One of the tasks is to scale up their use by Ukrainian manufacturers. Meanwhile, the creation of new support programmes largely depends on the political will of the Governments of Ukraine and Italy. Therefore, we separately discussed the need for effective communication at the intergovernmental level.
In this context, we discussed the FEU’s cooperation experience with Denmark’s export credit agency EIFO, which, with the support of the FEU, successfully implements projects in Ukraine and directly finances Ukrainian businesses that purchase Danish products and services. We hope that joint efforts and the FEU’s established cooperation with the Confederation of Italian Industry, the Italian Machine Tool Manufacturers’ Association, SACE, and other Italian partners will soon make it possible to introduce a similar cooperation model with Italy.
Colleagues from SACE also expressed readiness to cooperate and actively participate in events dedicated to the “Industrial Ramstein” during the Ukraine Recovery Conference, which will take place in Rome on 10–11 July this year. Our work continues.
Our reliable long-term partners — the ILO, within the framework of the Belgian Government’s project “ILO Support to Ukraine: Preventing Labour Exploitation and Human Trafficking, Supporting Entrepreneurship Development, and Institutional Support for Social Partners” — support us in implementing the “Industrial Ramstein” initiative.
