Signing of CERN's 300 million EUR loan from the EIB in December 2002. From left to right : Philippe Busquin, European Research Commissioner, Philippe Maystadt, EIB President and Luciano Maiani, Director General of CERN

The European Investment Bank (EIB) is lending EUR 300 million to finance the final phase of construction of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN , the European Organization for Nuclear Research. The EIB loan will also help to finance the instrumentation to record and analyse the high-energy particle collisions at the LHC. A loan to enable construction of this major project was foreseen by CERN's governing Council when it approved the LHC in 1996.