The European Investment Bank (EIB) has lent another half a billion Euros to Eni — this time for a biorefinery conversion at Sannazzaro de’ Burgondi, in the Italian province of Pavia. It’s a 15-year, €500 million loan, signed on 1 April 2026 by EIB Vice-President Gelsomina Vigliotti and Eni CEO Claudio Descalzi, and it comes on top of an identical €500 million loan the EIB gave Eni in July 2025 for its Livorno refinery. Two biorefineries, one billion Euro of European public money, one fossil fuel company.
On paper, the pitch is simple: Sannazzaro will turn waste like used cooking oil and animal fats into HVO diesel and sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) from 2028, feeding Eni’s ambition to reach 5 million tonnes of biofuel capacity by 2030. The EIB frames it as strengthening “Europe’s capacity to produce advanced fuels”. But a closer look at who is receiving this money raises uncomfortable questions about what the EIB’s climate lending is actually for.
A perfect timing
The loan was signed just weeks after Eni presented its 2026-2030 strategic plan, promising shareholders a growing dividend, a share buyback starting at €1.5 billion (already raised twice since, to €3.4 billion), and an extraordinary dividend whenever oil prices climb above $90 a barrel. This is not a company short of cash. It’s a highly profitable oil major choosing to prioritise shareholder payouts, while the EIB steps in to help bankroll its refinery conversions on preferential terms. It’s fair to ask why a company handing out billions in buybacks needs a concessional public loan to convert a refinery it already owns. The EIB could have used this money instead to renovate social housing, build schools and hospitals or finance clean energy cooperatives.
Eni is also busy in Brussels. A Reclaim Finance report on lobbying around the Omnibus I regulation lists Eni among the fossil fuel companies paying the consultancy NOVE — which also represents ExxonMobil, TotalEnergies and Equinor — to lobby the European Parliament, at the very moment climate transition-plan requirements were being stripped from EU due diligence law. A company spending resources to weaken EU climate rules, financed by the EU’s own climate bank for its “green” business.
Doubts raised directly with the EIB
That’s why a coalition of civil society organisations wrote to EIB Vice-Presidents Gelsomina Vigliotti and Ambroise Fayolle in July, asking the Bank to freeze disbursement.
Their first concern is traceability. Sannazzaro’s fuel is meant to come from non-food waste, precisely so it can count as Sustainable Aviation Fuel under EU rules. But used cooking oil and other waste fuel (namely palm oil mill effluent) supply chains have long been vulnerable to fraud, with virgin palm oil relabelled as “waste” — including a case in Indonesia implicating a supplier to Eni. The signatories argue the ISCC certification — a major EU-certified verifier of the bloc’s imports of palm oil products for biofuels — scheme Eni relies on has repeatedly failed to detect this fraud. They also flag Eni’s sourcing from Kenya and the Republic of Congo, where the production of castor and croton crops have dispossessed and impoverished farmers, and note that Eni’s own shortfall in Kenyan feedstock has pushed it to import South African rapeseed — undercutting its promise not to compete with food crops.
Second, the letter argues the loan shouldn’t be eligible under the EIB’s own PATH framework, designed to stop the Bank greenwashing companies still expanding fossil fuels. Under this framework, high-emitting corporations should not receive EIB financing support once oil and gas exploration exceeds 20% of turnover; Eni’s was over 90% in 2025, and oil and gas will make up 79% of its investment through 2028. A €1 billion combined loan for Sannazzaro and Livorno, the signatories argue, can hardly count as an “exceptional circumstance” — and Eni has openly stated it sought EIB backing partly to bolster its image as a credible transition company, despite being able to raise this capital privately.
The letter also raises new hydrogen-related safety risks for workers when oil refineries are retrofitted, and notes the environmental and social impact assessment for Sannazzaro was still incomplete when the loan was approved. It closes by asking the EIB to redirect the money to green public services, renewables, regenerative agriculture or transport electrification instead — arguing that the only real transition pathway for oil refineries is to close them down.
The view from Kenya
An investigation by Politico and SourceMaterial, based on interviews with dozens of Kenyan farmers, backs up those concerns. Farmers described replacing maize with castor on the promise of good money, only for Eni’s intermediaries to never return to collect the harvest, leaving families without food or income. Transport & Environment, whose trade data fed the investigation, warns this raises serious doubts about whether non-food biofuel feedstock can be scaled up sustainably at all — in Kenya or anywhere else.
Whose transition?
A concessional loan to a company busy rewarding shareholders, lobbying to weaken EU climate rules, and a flagship “sustainable” feedstock project that Kenyan farmers describe as leaving them hungry — none of this sits easily with the EIB’s claim to be Europe’s climate bank. That’s exactly why it matters who gets public money by EIB, on what terms, and with what accountability. Right now, Eni looks less like a company that needs the EIB’s help to transition, and more like one that has learned how to make public money work for its own bottom line and its image.
