UK Government Declines Support for Global Defence Bank Initiative

By Iain Withers, Elizabeth Piper and Virginia Furness

LONDON (Reuters) -Britain's government will not back a high-profile initiative to form a multilateral defence bank, dealing a blow to a plan to create a global state-backed lender to help rearm countries.

For the first time since former NATO security advisers, senior British ex-military personnel and bankers publicly aired detailed plans for the Defence, Security and Resilience Bank, or DSRB, last year, Britain has ruled out participation.

"The DSRB proposals are not backed by the UK government, and the representatives of these concepts do not represent the government or any of its ministers. The UK has no plans to join this initiative," Britain's Treasury, or finance ministry, said in a statement to Reuters.

It precedes a meeting planned to take place in the City of London on Monday when the DSRB has invited 41 countries, including Germany, Japan and the United States, as well as Britain, to discuss how to fund the proposed bank, two sources familiar with the matter told Reuters. They declined to be named.

The DSRB has not made public who might attend the meeting.

A spokesperson for the DSRB declined to comment.

Government spokespeople for the United States, Germany and Japan did not immediately respond to Reuters' requests for comment.

Advised by a group of senior retired military personnel, including Stuart Peach, a former British chief of the defence staff and former chairman of the NATO military committee, some analysts had expected the DSRB to secure Britain as one of its main backers.

The DSRB, a planned 100 billion pound ($135.1 billion) state-backed lender, is jockeying for support in an increasingly crowded field for defence sector financing initiatives - including within Europe from the European Investment Bank.

After Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and responding to U.S. President Donald Trump's demands for Europe to increase its defence spending, NATO nations have pledged to raise their defence budgets even though their public finances are strained.

Defence industry sources cautioned securing multilateral backing for the project could be difficult.

The two sources said the DSRB aimed to be larger and truly international to try to meet the scale of the funding needs, after NATO leaders in June pledged hundreds of billions of dollars of additional funding to core defence, such as troops and weapons and related areas like cybersecurity.

The DSRB said in August it had signed up several private sector banks to support its launch - Commerzbank, ING, JP Morgan, LBBW and RBC Capital Markets.

($1 = 0.7402 pounds)

(Reporting by Iain Withers, Elizabeth Piper and Virginia Furness; additional reporting Sarah Marsh in Berlin, Timothy Kelly in Toyko and Idrees Ali in Washington; editing by Barbara Lewis)