AIIB boss says bank is ‘politically sensitive’ but ‘apolitical’

The president of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank has pushed back at the idea that Western powers were excluded from the founding of the multilateral lender last decade. Based in Beijing, AIIB launched in 2016 and now has 110 members and a capitalization of $100 billion. Its founding president, Jin Liqun, a former vice minister at the Chinese Ministry of Finance, ranking vice president at the Asian Development Bank, and alternate executive director for China at the World Bank, is now nearing the end of his second five-year term, which began in January 2021. Japan and the United States decided not to join AIIB, which was first proposed by Chinese President Xi Jinping in 2013. China has by far the largest voting share at 26.6%. “We did not invite the United States, Japan, or European countries to join the bank,” Jin told Devex World in Washington, D.C., Thursday. “We invited the United States, Japan, European countries, to join in the making of the bank, making rules together. To draw an analogy: I invited the United States to come to the kitchen, ‘let’s make the cake together’.” The Obama administration cited concerns in 2015 over “governance, and environmental and social safeguards.” The United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Australia did join, straining relations with Washington — which cautioned at the time that “constant accommodation of China … is not the best way to engage a rising power.” Concerns over Beijing’s influence flared again last year when AIIB’s Canadian former head of communications, Bob Pickard, left the bank, claiming that the Chinese Communist Party acted like an “invisible government” inside the institution. An internal review found “no undue influence” on board or management decisions. “A multilateral development bank should remain apolitical,” Jin told Devex. “But for the management members to keep this bank apolitical, you have to be politically sensitive, which means we need to work with all of the members and all those non-members, to ensure that anything we do would protect this bank in the best interest of all of the members.” That followed a question about Huawei, the Chinese technology company that has been sanctioned by the U.S. over national security concerns. Jin said AIIB’s procurement policy aimed to secure high-quality contractors who delivered on time, but added “I have to highlight the point: we do not acknowledge sanctions except those by the United Nations Security Council.” “It’s very much a delicate issue,” Jin said. “But I think we can manage and I certainly hope all of the members of the international community would be supporting the multilateral development banks and have all these contractors be competing on a level playing field.” Jin later made headlines Saturday, telling the Group of Thirty International Banking Seminar that U.S., Canadian, and European tariff hikes on Chinese-made electric vehicles meant there was “no longer free trade.” “What worries us even more is the barriers to trade in low carbon and renewable energy products, which are rising even more faster, just when we need more of these green products to save the planet,” he said.