The European Commission had a period of two months to evaluate the addendum to the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan sent by the Government at the beginning of June that came to an end next Monday, however, as La Información has learned, am bass parties have decided to extend the deadline until September 6, which ended this Monday. Ministry sources Funds for economic affairs and Next Generation digital transformation to which you can still apply, as well as another 2,600 million from the REpowerEU mechanism.
The body chaired by Úrsula von der Leyen has also confirmed the decision to this newspaper, which it ensures has been taken by mutual agreement with the Spanish authorities. From the outset, the possibility of extending this period had been considered, given that Spain had fulfilled its ‘duties’ with plenty of room, the country was obliged to submit the document to the European institutions before August 31, but it did on June 6. The Government spent months working on the draft of the addendum – it had sent the first project to Brussels in December – however, the anticipated call for elections led the cabinet of Nadia Calviño to step on the accelerator to leave everything elected before the oral appointment, anticipating that the investiture of the future president of the Government would not take place before September.
Sending this document before the expiration of the term would reduce the margin of action of the new executive when all the polling houses pointed out that the Party would manage the Government of the community funds and their distribution in the territory. Although, as the head of the Economy, Nadia Calviño, had already pointed out, the ability of the government team that took the baton at the head of La Moncloa to make changes was small, since the great package of reforms was already committed to the European Commission a little over two years ago.
The addendum to the Recovery Plan involves updating the document approved in 2021, which incorporates a series of definitions in the milestones and objectives committed then. These changes are motivated by the consequences of the war in Ukraine -especially intense in terms of energy- and have also been applied by other neighboring economies such as Germany or Portugal. In total, the document incorporates 18 new reforms that had not been contemplated two years ago, although a significant number of them were already approved in the Council of Ministers prior to the general elections on July 23.
One more month to introduce draft changes
With this decision, both parties expand the possibilities of introducing significant changes in the new plan presented by Spain to access 84,000 million in loans and 7,700 million in additional transfers. When this negotiation comes to an end, the document will be sent to the European Council made up of the ministers of each of the 27 member states and whose presidency Spain holds until one year. This body will have another additional month to evaluate the design of investments orchestrated by our country, but then it will no longer be possible to modify the orientation of the policies or the reforms, only make minor changes.
The European Commission has refused to enter into assessing the state of the negotiations with Spain when asked by this means, but it does clarify that the issue of tolls that was brought up in the last week of the electoral campaign by the PP, is out of the question. these conversions. The executive body understands that the Recovery Plan proposed by Spain “includes the commitment to adopt a law on sustainable mobility and transport financing by December 2023” which would establish a payment mechanism for the use of the road by 2024 However, it will convey that this matter will be addressed when the request for the sixth payment of the funds is received and for the moment, the Government has not sent the fourth request.
As confirmed by sources from the Ministry of Finance headed by María Jesús Montero, there is no deadline to submit this request, but Spain had been the first country in the European Union to request the first payments, which has meant that this ‘delay’ has been read in some surroundings as a delay. As Calviño explained in a press conference after the Council of Ministers, it was not possible to submit this request before the 2023 elections because “several reforms” were pending for the fourth payment. Some of them, such as the Authority for the Defense of Financial Clients, have already received the green light from the Government, but they fell in the middle of their processing with the dissolution of the Cortes.
According to the latest report on the execution of the Recovery Plan, presented by the Minister of Finance in February 2023, 160,000 million euros have already been allocated to Spain from the ‘NextGenerationEu’ funds. In March, it became the first country to receive the third payment of 6,000 million euros from all of Europe, which raised the total amount received in this concept to 37,000 million euros. In that presentation, Moncloa boasted of the progressive acceleration in the distribution of funds, which by then had reached 150,000 companies, 5,000 research centers and 27,000 individuals. A first impact that was added to the structural reforms implemented (labour, professional training, startups and bankruptcy) was estimated at 2.6 percentage points of GDP for the period 2021-2031.
