By Jonathan Spicer, Iain Withers and Marc Jones
ANKARA/LONDON, July 2 (Reuters) – Canada is aiming to co-announce around 10 founding nations for a global defence bank at next week’s NATO summit in Turkey, the lead Canadian negotiator told Reuters on Thursday.
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney is promoting the Defence, Security and Resilience Bank (DSRB) as part of his call this year for an alliance of “middle powers” to combat what he sees as the fracturing of the traditional U.S.-led world order.
“We gave ourselves the NATO summit as a deadline … What we are aiming to announce is the list of founding members,” Isabelle Hudon, Canada’s top negotiator in the launch of the multilateral initiative, and CEO of the Business Development Bank of Canada, said in an interview.
The bank’s purpose is to bolster the defence of allied nations by raising up to £100 billion ($133 billion) in cheap finance.
Hudon said the initial roster of countries would likely all be European, besides Canada, but declined to name them. She cautioned the announcement was not guaranteed and depended on final negotiations with allies, including over their capital commitments, but said the project had momentum.
“My prime minister said we should not aim for perfection before launching this initiative, that we should rally the countries that are ready to be called founding members, and then the membership will stay open,” Hudon said.
The project’s fate remains uncertain without the backing of nations crucial to it securing a triple-A credit rating.
The DSRB has had productive talks with South Korea and there was a 50-50 chance of it joining, potentially later, Hudon said, adding that no other G7 nations were close to signing up for now. South Korea’s Finance Ministry has previously told Reuters it was reviewing the proposal.
Canada’s Finance Ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
(Reporting by Jonathan Spicer in Ankara and Iain Withers and Marc Jones in London, Additional reporting by Caroline Stauffer, Andrew Gray, Promit Mukherjee, Maria Cheng, Maria Martinez, Elizabeth Piper, Giuseppe Fonte, Anthony Deutsch, Jihoon Lee, Jan Strupczewski; Editing by Rod Nickel)
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