European industry is being challenged by a number of factors: high inflation, labour shortages, supply chain disruptions, rising interest rates, and spikes in energy costs and input prices.

Brussels has already unveiled several initiatives to support its industry, the most important and recent of which is the Green Deal Industrial Plan proposed in early February, the zero-emissions package for the competitiveness of European industry within which the idea of an embryonic form of a European sovereign wealth fund found a place.

The need for a more structural response to business investment made the Commission to launch STEP, in a sense the precursor to the European Sovereignty Fund. An instrument, the latter, hampered by politically divisive debates among