It will analyze the fulfillment of milestones and objectives, as well as the management, audit and control systems in force.
MADRID, 19 Feb. (EUROPA PRESS) –
A delegation from the European Parliament’s Committee on Budgetary Control will be in Spain from Monday 20 to Wednesday 22 February to examine how European funds for recovery, the so-called ‘Next Generation EU’, are being used.
The mission to Spain will be made up of 10 MEPs, members of various political groups, six of whom are attached to the European Parliament’s Committee on Budgetary Control, which will prepare a report on the matter after its return to Brussels.
MEPs, led by the chair of the committee, Monika Hohlmeier, want to assess on the ground the implementation of the National Recovery and Resilience Plan, including the achievement of milestones and targets, and in particular the management, audit and control systems in place .
Together with the president of the Europarliamentary commission, Monika Hohlmeier, who leads the delegation, a group of MEPs travels, mostly Spanish: Isabel Benjumea (PP), Isabel García Muñoz and Eider Gardiazabal (PSOE), Eva María Poptcheva and Susana Solís ( Cs), Ernest Urtasun (En Comú Podem) and Jorge Buxadé (Vox).
The MEPs are scheduled to meet with the First Vice President and Minister for Economic Affairs and Digital Transformation, Nadia Calviño; the Minister of Finance and Public Function, María Jesús Montero, and the Minister of Inclusion, Social Security and Migrations, José Luis Escrivá, as well as regional councilors from Castilla-La Mancha, Madrid, Extremadura, Andalusia and Aragon. They will also meet with representatives of employers and unions, the digital industry, consultancy and investigative journalists.
At the proposal of the Spanish Government, they will also visit a project financed by the National Recovery Plan, the National Center for Neurotechnology.
“As representatives of the EU budgetary control authority, we want to see with our own eyes what is being done at the national level to protect the financial interests of the EU with this new financial instrument,” said the head of the delegation, Monika Hohlmeier, before the visit.
The Committee on Budgetary Control, made up of 30 MEPs, is one of the 20 permanent committees of the European Parliament and its job is to monitor how the budget of the European Union has been spent and to formulate proposals to improve its management.
Hohlmeier already urged by letter the First Vice President and Minister of Economic Affairs, Nadia Calviño, to facilitate the mission to control the spending of funds from the European Union (EU) that will visit Madrid this week, at the same time that it has made her ugly for having leaked another letter that the minister sent him on the 13th.
“It is surprising that the letter was released to the press very soon after I received it and before the members of the Commission and myself had the opportunity to take good note of its content,” said the MEP in a critique. letter sent last Wednesday and to which Europa Press has had access.
The MEP’s reprimand responds to a first letter sent by Calviño in which the vice president stressed that “the deployment of the Recovery Plan is subject to the highest audit and control standards” while reviewing some of the main investments in the plan and offered “full support and cooperation” of the Spanish authorities with the parliamentary mission.
Spain continues to lead the deployment of the Plan and has recently become the first Member State to receive a favorable evaluation from the Commission to receive the third disbursement of the ‘Next Generation EU’ funds, after having requested it last November.
Last Friday, the European Commission gave the go-ahead for the disbursement to Spain of the third tranche of the Recovery and Resilience plan, endowed with 6,000 million euros, by concluding the required milestones and reforms, so it must now face the measures to which the fourth payment is subject, including the reform of the pension system.
The satisfactory evaluation of the 29 milestones and reforms still needs the endorsement of the rest of the Twenty-seven before the payment can be made, probably in March. The 6,000 million will thus be added to the 31,036 million euros already received, including the advance of 9,036 million and the 22,000 million of the first two tranches.
With the validation of the third tranche, Brussels also closed the supervision of the milestone that requires having a computerized audit system, a commitment that was considered good with the first disbursement but that was committed to specific surveillance to ensure its ” continued compliance”.
Community sources have pointed out that the commitments have now been implemented, so there will be no more follow-up linked to this specific milestone, number 173, although they add that each of the national plans is subject to control procedures and audits provided for by the regulation.
The Spanish Executive is now facing the measures to which the fourth payment is subject, including the reform of the pension system, while it is finalizing the draft addendum to the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan that it is currently negotiating with the European Commission and which should be approved in March.
With this addendum, the Government intends to request all the funds allocated to Spain. This includes loans (84,000 million), as well as additional transfers to boost the strategic economy (7,700 million), as well as those framed in the RePowerEU plan (2,600 million).
Most of the 7,700 million euros of additional transfers will be used to reinforce the 11 Strategic Projects for Economic Recovery and Transformation (Perte) already underway and the launch of a new strategic project, the Decarbonization Perte, which will have 3,100 millions of euros. This new Perte, together with the Perte Chip and the ERHA, will be the ones that receive the most additional resources due to their relevance in key areas such as the energy transition and strategic autonomy.
In total, Spain will strengthen strategic projects by allocating more than 26,300 million additional public resources to them, coming from transfers and loans associated with the addendum.
The loans will be channeled through loans through 12 funds –8 of them new– destined for the productive fabric and regional projects. In addition, the addendum includes a program of complementary reforms to those already deployed. These are 30 reforms, some of which include various actions, which comply with the specific recommendations for Spain within the framework of the European semester.
All in all, the execution of the Recovery Plan together with the addendum will allow the level of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to increase up to 3 percentage points on average each year until 2031.
