EVCA Calls For State Support For European Venture Capital

by Ulrika Lomas, Tax-News.com, Brussels

20 October 2009

The European Venture Capital Association (EVCA) is promoting a new pan-European fund of funds similar to the UK Innovation Fund. The Association is calling on the EU to match private sector venture allocations with a EUR1.5bn fund of funds to provide capital to European venture firms.

The new Risk Capital Action Plan 2020 was unveiled at this year’s EVCA Venture Capital Forum in Berlin. It also entails regulatory support and seeks to mitigate the “unintended consequences of crisis-driven regulation."

Javier Echarri, secretary general of the EVCA, said: “EVCA’s proposal to use public support for European venture capital to attract private sector funding includes incentivizing privately-managed funds of funds to select the best European venture capital managers and to sell their potential to investors across the world. To succeed, these funds of funds would need commercially viable strategies, as defined by their private sector investors.”

The EVCA would like to see a release of EUR300m of EU funds every two years to one or more fund managers, on condition that this matches already committed private sector funds. It should be highly selective and focus only on "technology with World beating potential."

A comprehensive report in our Intelligence Report series examining tax-sheltering arrangements for investors, including Venture Capital, Forest Finance and Film Finance in a number of key jurisdictions, is available in the Lowtax Library at http://www.lowtaxlibrary.com/asp/subs_reports.asp and a description of the report can be seen at http://www.lowtaxlibrary.com/asp/description_report5.asp

 

 






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