Spain will receive the third disbursement of European Next Generation funds worth 6,000 million euros over the next two months. It is the calendar that the Ministry of Economic Affairs manages, after the European Commission unblocked that payment last Friday after acknowledging that Spain has met twenty-nine objectives linked to this aid that was required of it, and that the first vice president, Nadia Calviño, has confirmed in an interview with the program ‘La Hora de la 1’, on TVE. This amount will be added to the 31,000 million that the country already received over the past year as grants from the program designed to alleviate the serious economic crisis caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.
“The important thing is that they see that we meet the milestones,” said the ‘number two’ of the Government, who has also highlighted how having annual budgets has been key to being able to channel funds that are being key to the recovery of the country and without which “it is not possible to understand” that Spain has grown two consecutive years at a rate of 5.5%. Calviño has made it clear that this year it will be the autonomous communities that will have an important role in ensuring that the money from the funds reaches the projects and penetrates the economy, given the amount of money that the State transferred to them last year. .
The vice-president is scheduled to meet this afternoon with the representatives of the delegation of the European Parliament’s Committee on Budgetary Control who have arrived in Spain for three days to examine how European funds are being used for recovery. The visit comes preceded by an exchange of letters between Calviño herself and the head of the mission, the German right-wing MEP Monika Hohlmeier, who came to express doubts about the management of European funds. Both the Minister of Economic Affairs and the Minister of Finance, María Jesús Montero, defended in their letters the transparency and efficiency of the Government in the use of the Recovery Plan.
“I know the budget committee well,” recalled Calviño, who was CEO of Budgets between May 2014 and June 2018, after also stressing that the Executive has made itself available to the representatives of said committee who have traveled to Madrid to transfer all the information about the use of the Next Generation with the “maximum transparency”.
