AIIB head fields questions from news executives

Michinobu Yanagisawa, assistant director, The Japan News, a subsidiary of Yomiuri Shimbun

What is the desirable ratio between the number of standalone projects and cofinancing projects? Are you going to provide financing to projects outside of the Chinese government's priorities, such as the Belt and Road Initiative?

I'm going to get a Japanese national to serve in a very senior position in our bank. Recently your senior officials came to see me, looking for possible cooperation. I believe we can work together to promote development in Asia. We don't have a fixed target with regard to the ratio of standalone projects vis-a-vis cofinancing. We will take in projects that meet our standards.

Probably in the future, there will clearly be a higher proportion of cofinancing projects. When it comes to huge infrastructure projects, it's easy to go over $1 billion, it's not really a great idea for one institution to single-handedly manage the finances of a project.

But also, just because we are a little bit different from the existing institutions, we do not take poverty reduction as a direct objective. Poverty reduction will be a derivative of our efforts, so our focus will be a little bit different.

Some of the projects that cannot be done by some other institutions will be perfectly all right for us to finance. So I also think we could have a clearly greater proportion of free-standing projects, particularly after we have recruited all our operational staff in the next couple of years.

When you recruit people, you really have to be more or less sure if he or she will be a good team worker, if he or she will be working very well and would achieve very high success by working at this institution.