The Parliament mission, which will evaluate the execution of the recovery plan, headed by the President of the Commission, Monika Hohlmeier, arrives in Spain this Monday for a three-day visit in which they will hold multiple meetings and whose focus will be on supervising the management, audit and control systems put in place by the national authorities.
The work of this group of ten MEPs coincides with the approval of the European Commission for the third disbursement to Spain, another 6,000 million that will be transferred within a month when they are also approved by the rest of the Member States and will increase 0 to 37 million .the funds already transferred.
Visit after recent criticism of Calvino
The mission is headed by the president of the European Parliament’s Committee on Budgetary Control, Monika Hohlmeier, of the European People’s Party, who has been especially incisive with the information available on the spending of the Spanish plan and recently sent a letter riddled with criticism of the Spanish Vice President for Economic Affairs, Nadia Calviño.
The German is accompanied by the Portuguese Jose Manuel Fernandes, also from the EPP, the Social Democrats Isabel García (PSOE) and the Italian Caterina Chinnici, and the VOX MEP Jorge Buxadé. The ‘popular’ Isabel Benjumea, the socialist Eider Gardiazábal, the MEPs for Citizens Eva Poptcheva and Susana Solís, and Ernest Urtasun (Catalunya en Comú) participate as “accompaniers”.
It is, in any case, a routine monitoring mission that the European Parliament will repeat in other countries to assess the implementation of their national reform and investment strategies.
On Wednesday, at a press conference scheduled for noon, they will share a series of conclusions that, however, will not be binding for future disbursements, since the analysis and approval of each of them corresponds to the European Commission and the Member states.
exchange of letters
The visit also has as a backdrop the accusations made by Hohlmeier in a letter in response to a previous letter sent by Calviño and also the Minister of Finance, María Jesús Montero. In it, the German reproached the Spanish vice president for not facilitating the mission and accused her of passing the responsibility for the execution of the plan to the autonomous communities.
In the text, Hohlmeier takes note of Calviño’s “proactivity” for having contacted first, criticizes that it was leaked to the press shortly after and is “sure that (the Spanish vice president) did not intend to anticipate the conclusions of the mission before it had started. She also urges him to facilitate a meeting with the previous director general in charge of executing the recovery plan, Rocío Frutos, whose meeting “unfortunately” is not among those scheduled during the visit.
In addition to meetings with Calviño, Montero and the Minister of Inclusion and Social Security, José Luis Escrivá, the three-day visit includes exchanges with representatives of the regional governments of Castilla-La Mancha, Madrid, Aragón, Extremadura and Andalusia, as well as with the CEOE, UGT or the association of self-employed workers ATA. Meetings will also be held with associations such as ANFAC, AEB or Ametic, as well as with the Chamber of Commerce, the consultants Ernst & Young and PWC and a small group of journalists.
In addition to this, two other missions will travel to Spain next week, one to analyze with the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) the future legislation on the protection of geographic images and another to evaluate gender policies and fight against sexist violence.
