Eduardo González
The Council of Ministers authorized this Tuesday the modification of the current limits of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to acquire budgetary spending commitments, in order to enable the organization of the IV International Conference on Financing for Development of the UN.
Through this authorization, the limits established to acquire spending commitments for future years are modified, as provided for in General Budget Law 47/2003, so that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs can process in advance the technical support contract for the organization of the IV International Conference on Financing for Development of the UN, as well as other service contracts.
Seville will host, between June 30 and July 3, 2025, the IV International Conference on Financing for Development (FfD4), which will have as its main objective the mobilization of funds for Agenda 2030. The first three conferences were held in Monterrey in 2002, in Doha in 2008 and in Addis Ababa in 2015.
For this reason, on July 17, the Office for the Organization of the International Conference was created by Royal Decree, dependent on the General Secretariat of the Presidency of the Government and responsible for coordinating the logistics necessary for the celebration of this event.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, through the General Directorate of the Foreign Service, will provide the essential services and supplies for this Conference, with an estimated budget of 61,940,000.00 euros, according to the forecasts made by the aforementioned Office. This amount includes a technical support contract that will cover telecommunications, audiovisual, office automation and electricity services, essential for the proper development of the event, as well as a supplementary cybersecurity contract.
Consequently, the aforementioned Directorate General of the Foreign Service needs to carry out the advance processing of the expenditure files, with an annual payment in 2025, which are charged to the budget application ‘Meetings, conferences and courses’, for an amount of 61,940,000 euros. In addition, another 5,555,699.74 euros must be allocated by the Undersecretariat of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for the execution of other contracts linked to services abroad.
Taking into account both the commitments previously acquired for 2025 (21,037,064.65 euros) and the new commitments (67,495,699.74 euros), the total sum is 88,532,764.39 euros. Therefore, since the limits established in the General Budget Law will be exceeded in the 2025 financial year, the authorization of the Council of Ministers has been requested to raise the limit of maximum expenditure commitments in the aforementioned budgetary application.
