Netherlands launches billion-euro small business fund - by Janene Van Jaarsveldt

Small and medium sized enterprises in the Netherlands now have a new opportunity to get a loan – the Netherlands Investment Institution has opened its Commercial Loan Fund, which has about 1 billion euros available to issue loans to SMEs.

Half of that money comes from six institutional investors – Aegon, ASR, Pension Fund Metal & Engineering, Pension Fund PGB, NN and the European Investment Fund, NOS reports. These investors contributed a total o 480 million euros. Banks contributed the other half. The Fund was established last year with the help of the Ministry of Economic Affairs. It aims to encourage investment in SMEs by bringing supply and demand of loans together.

According to the Netherlands Investment Institution, NLII, up until now there were a number of barriers standing in the way of SMEs getting loans. For example, the loans the companies need are too small to be of interest to institutional investors. Or banks being unable to approve a loan because they have too much money outstanding with a company or sector.

The NLII wants to resolve these problems by bundling the loans together, making it more attractive to institutional investors, and making half of the money come from the fund and half from the banks, giving banks more room to lend money. The fund gives loans of between 5 million and 25 million euros, with banks contributing an equal amount. The investors investing in the Fund receive a market interest rate on their investment.

“We are enabling entrepreneurs to make use of a new and additional funding channel worth about 1 billion euros. At the same time, institutional investors re getting a new opportunity to invest directly in the Dutch economy through the Commercial Loan Fund”, according to NLII director Loek Sibbing.

Read more: Netherlands launches billion-euro small business fund - NL Times

USA: Nov. elections: Multi-National Inc's Aid U.S. Chamber of Commerce (influencing elections) - by Eric Lipton, Mike McIntire, and Don Van Natta

Prudential Financial sent in a $2 million donation last year as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce kicked off a national advertising campaign to weaken the historic rewrite of the nation’s financial regulations.
Dow Chemical delivered $1.7 million to the chamber last year as the group took a leading role in aggressively fighting proposed rules that would impose tighter security requirements on chemical facilities.

And Goldman Sachs, Chevron Texaco, and Aegon, a multinational insurance company based in the Netherlands, donated more than $8 million in recent years to a chamber foundation that has been critical of growing federal regulation and spending. These large donations — none of which were publicly disclosed by the chamber, a tax-exempt group that keeps its donors secret, as it is allowed by law — offer a glimpse of the chamber’s money-raising efforts, which it has ramped up recently in an orchestrated campaign to become one of the most well-financed critics of the Obama administration and an influential player in this fall’s Congressional elections.

The chamber’s increasingly aggressive role — including record spending in the midterm elections that supports Republicans more than 90 percent of the time — has made it a target of critics, including a few local chamber affiliates who fear it has become too partisan and hard-nosed in its fund-raising.
The chamber is spending big in political races from California to New Hampshire, including nearly $1.5 million on television advertisements in New Hampshire attacking Representative Paul W. Hodes, a Democrat running for the United States Senate, accusing him of riding Nancy Pelosi’s “liberal express” down the road to financial ruin.

For more: Top Corporations Aid U.S. Chamber of Commerce Campaign - NYTimes.com