Greece — EIB signs EUR 100 million Piraeus Bank loan dedicated to security & defence SMEs

Mechanism

The EIB signed a EUR 100 million intermediated loan with Piraeus Bank SA on 18 December 2025 (approved by the EIB board 12 November 2025) under the "Piraeus Bank L4SMEs Security & Defence" project, reference 20250612. Piraeus on-lends the facility to Greek SMEs and mid-caps, with a binding condition that at least 50% of the total amount finance enterprises active in the security and defence sector — the remainder can go to general SME/mid-cap credit lines. The EIB frames this as addressing a financing gap specific to defence-sector suppliers, who face constrained bank access because of dual-use classification and sector-specific sensitivities that make ordinary credit underwriting harder. The EIB's own project page describes it as the Bank's first-ever financing in Greece dedicated specifically to the security and defence sector, positioned under a broader "Pan-EU Security & Defence Lending Envelope" programme. Global Trade Alert separately logs the same transaction as a "certainly harmful" / red-flagged state-linked lending-support intervention (GTA intervention 151937, state act 96015), though GTA's public listing states the headline amount as EUR 200 million — double the EUR 100 million loan amount confirmed on the EIB's own project page. This action uses the EIB-confirmed figure.

Downstream implications

• Distinct from, and signed one day before, the EIB's horizontal EUR 200 million "Growth4MidCaps

LRS II" guarantee with the same counterpart, Piraeus Bank (filed 2025-12-19) — the two operations together show the EIB running parallel general-purpose and defence-earmarked credit lines through the same Greek bank within 24 hours of each other.

• Extends the same "Pan-EU Security & Defence Lending Envelope" pattern seen in the EIB's EUR 200

million Santander defence supply-chain guarantee (also 19 December 2025, filed separately) and the EIB's broader push (press release 2025-236) to triple financing available to banks for Europe's defence industry — a fifth EIB Group counterpart-bank defence facility in the same policy window.

• The 50%-minimum (rather than 100%) sector earmark means actual defence-sector disbursement volume

will not be observable from the EIB project page alone; downstream tracking would need Piraeus Bank's own reporting.

Open questions

• Whether the discrepancy between GTA's reported EUR 200 million headline figure and the EIB's

confirmed EUR 100 million loan amount reflects a GTA data error, a since-revised facility size, or a different denominator (e.g. total mobilised on-lending including Piraeus's own funding) is not resolved in the available public sources.

• No disclosure of guarantee/loan tenor, pricing terms, or the expected number of defence-sector

SME beneficiaries.