The Diplomat
The First Vice President and Acting Minister of Economic Affairs and Digital Transformation, Nadia Calviño, said yesterday in Brussels that the Government is confident that the European Commission will formally approve, “in the coming weeks”, the revision of the Spanish Recovery Plan, which will allow the mobilization of 94,000 million euros that will be added to the 37,000 million that Spain has already received from European funds.
Last June, Spain asked Brussels to authorize the addendum to its Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan, related to the second part of the pension reform. The usual deadline for evaluation by the European Commission is usually two months, but this was extended to an additional month because of the August vacations. In this context, the deadline to receive the evaluation from Brussels -which requires the approval of the 27 Member States- ended just yesterday, but the resolution is going to be delayed due to the need to address in more detail some additional elements, as already happened with Italy.
The Spanish government is awaiting the resolution to request the 10 billion euros of the fourth tranche of the European Next Generation funds (7.7 billion euros in transfers and 2.6 billion euros of the REpowerEU mechanism to break the energy dependence on Moscow) and to access the second phase of the European Recovery Plan and to opt for the 84 billion euros in loans that correspond to it from the aforementioned mechanism.
In statements to the press on the occasion of her trip to Brussels to participate in the annual meeting of the European think-tank Bruegel and to meet with several European commissioners, Calviño said yesterday that both the Commission and the Spanish government expect to close the “pending issues imminently” and that she trusts that “the process will be set in motion, so that in the coming weeks we can have that formal approval”. “Once we have the validation of the addendum, we will request the fourth payment; we are working in parallel the two issues,” she added at the entrance of the Commission’s main building. The disbursement request must be executed in 2023 to meet the deadlines agreed with the European Commission.
To this end, according to Calviño, the Spanish government is “working intensively” with the Commission, especially with the Commissioner for Economy, Paolo Gentiloni, with whom she herself met yesterday in Brussels. The acting Vice-President was also received by the Commissioner for International Partnerships, Jutta Urpilainen, by the Vice-President of the European Commission, Valdis Dombrovskis, and by the Commissioner for Financial Services, Mairead McGuinness.
“The fact that the government is in office has not slowed down the intense work we have been carrying out to present the proposal for the addendum and to work intensively with all the services of the Commission during these summer months,” she assured. “I hope that this work will be completed in the near future and I am confident that we will soon have the validation by the European Commission of the addendum to the Recovery Plan to be able to implement the second phase of the plan,” she insisted.
