VP of China-based AIIB says bank has proven doubters ‘100% wrong’

In the more than 10 years since its inception, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) – a Beijing-headquartered multilateral development lender representing 110 member states – has proved critics “100 per cent wrong”, a senior executive said, adding its door will “always” be open to new entrants as well as private capital.

Danny Alexander – who moved to Beijing in February 2016 to serve as the bank’s vice-president – called the AIIB a “remarkable” institution in an interview during the bank’s annual meeting in Samarkand, Uzbekistan on Thursday.

“When AIIB was first being proposed, people thought: was AIIB going to have lower standards? Was AIIB going to try to undermine the existing international system? We’ve proved all those things wrong,” he said.

Alexander works directly with Jin Liqun, the bank’s president and a former Chinese vice-minister of finance, to shape the institution’s overall strategy and philosophy of governance. Before that, he was Chief Secretary to the Treasury of the United Kingdom – a founding member of the bank with a 2.88 per cent voting share.

“AIIB was first proposed by China, but what’s been created is a genuinely multilateral institution where all the members are listening and engaged, and we have common high standards,” he said.