Sovereign wealth funds’ investments will be restricted in Europe unless they are more transparent, says the European Union’s top economic official in what will be seen as a warning to the Asian and Middle East state-run bodies amassing assets worth hundreds of billions of dollars round the world.

“We have good reasons to ask these funds to declare what kind of assets they want to invest in, what criteria they apply to decide their investments, and what the distribution of their investments is,” Joaquín Almunia, the EU’s commissioner for economic and monetary affairs, said in an interview. “If they don’t agree to these criteria, we can find good reasons to react in some cases, where these funds try to invest in some strategic sector or try to move towards some specific industries,” Mr Almunia said.