Recovery and Resilience Facility – endorsement with observations
The European Commission has endorsed the preliminary assessment of Romania’s third payment request under the Recovery and Resilience Facility.
Roxana Vasile, 16.10.2024, 14:00
The European Commission has endorsed a positive preliminary assessment of Romania’s third payment request under the Recovery and Resilience Facility, but is waiting for additional information from the Bucharest Government in order to make the full payment. According to the Commission’s assessment, Romania has partially fulfilled some of the assumed reforms and investments, so that Bucharest has seven months at the most to make the necessary corrections, in order to fully collect around 2 billion euros. According to the EC, Romania has fulfilled 62 of the 68 reform or investment milestones. Among the milestones achieved are the stimulation of energy efficiency in industry, the reform of the public pension system and investments to improve the energy efficiency of the existing building stock.
The Commission also found that six milestones have not been fulfilled at this stage. This concerns reforms of the governance of state-owned enterprises as well as investments in transport and a reform of the tax regime for microenterprises. The Commission therefore proposed to suspend part of the payment and gave the Romanian Government one month to submit its observations. After assessing the observations submitted by Romania, the Commission, if it considers them sufficient, will adopt a payment decision. Should the Commission confirm its assessment that the milestones in question have not been satisfactorily fulfilled, it will suspend part of the payment. From that moment, Romania will have a period of six months to fulfill the outstanding milestones. The Commission did not publicly communicate the value of the milestones it considers unfulfilled, which it only communicated to the Government of Romania.
ʺRomania will collect a significant amount that covers the fulfilled milestones of the Recovery and Resilience Facility. The request for payment is by no means suspended, nor the full payment, the Minister of European Investments and Projects,” Adrian Câciu, said.
In the context of the election campaign for the upcoming presidential and parliamentary elections, the Liberal leader Nicolae Ciucă, who runs for president, has called on his opponent, the Social Democratic Prime Minister Marcel Ciolacu, to urgently explain what he plans to do so that Romania does not lose approximately 1.1 billions of euros. “This opposition circus does not help anyone. Everything that the Commission has requested are things that happened during your term in office,” said Ciolacu, who leads the ruling coalition that the Liberals are also part of. We remind you that Romania’s Recovery and Resilience Plan includes a wide range of investment and reform measures. The plan will be financed with 28.5 billion euros, of which 13.6 billion euros in the form of grants and 14.9 billion euros in the form of loans.
