The EBRD has failed to properly assess 3 hydro projects it has approved for financing in Macedonia, Croatia and Georgia, according to bank internal investigations initiated after formal complaints by Bankwatch member groups. NGOs caution that...these improper assessments are a symptom of...a tendency to assume that all environmental damage can be ‘managed’, which from a business point of view is much more convenient than admitting that some projects simply should not go ahead. A body inside the EBRD created to investigate to what extent decisions of the bank comply with the institution’s environmental and social policy, the Projects Complaints Mechanism (PCM), recently released three separate reports looking at the EBRD’s decisions to finance three hydropower plants: Boskov Most in Macedonia (1), Ombla in Croatia (2) and Paravani In Georgia (3). In all three cases, the EBRD was found to have violated its own policies by improperly assessing the projects’ impact on biodiversity before committing to them and by failing to implement procedures that would ensure meaningful public participation in the decisions about the future of the projects...