The last obstacle has also fallen and now Recovery Fund funds are closer. All 27 EU Member States have completed the national process of ratification of the Next Generation Eu. This was announced by the European Commissioner for the Budget, Johannes Hahn, saying he was "confident that all the remaining steps can be finalized as early as May, which would allow us to kick off the Next Generation EU as early as June".
The Member States were called to approve the law "on own resources", i.e. the provision that requires individual countries to increase national contributions to the EU budget in order to provide Brussels with the necessary guarantees to borrow the 750 million euros of funds envisaged in the plan on the market.
RECOVERY FUNDS: THE LATEST RATIFICATIONS
The green light from the member states was one of the crucial steps for the launch of the Recovery Fund. Without everyone's approval, the plan would have risked falling apart because Brussels would not have been able to issue the bonds necessary to find the resources to distribute among the various countries. An important passage, therefore, not only from a formal point of view, but also from a political point of view because the fear was that the sovereign and anti-Europeanist forces present in the various Parliaments could get in the way, preventing the European Union from creating a "common debt" and therefore from reacting in a strong and united way to the economic crisis triggered by the Covid-19 pandemic.
The last countries to ratify the Recovery Plan were Austria and Poland, preceded by a few hours byHungary by Viktor Orban (where there were as many as 170 votes in favor against only 29 votes against), fromHolland and from Romania. In the previous days, the green light had also arrived Finland, where the internal disputes between the majority and the opposition over the budget maneuver had also jeopardized the vote on the Next Generation Eu, for which a qualified majority of two thirds was required.
Instead, everything went smoothly and now only the last formal steps remain to allow the Commission to finance itself on the market.
THE NEXT STEPS
The Commission can now get to work on the plan that will allow it to raise the funds necessary to finance the Recovery Fund and give the green light to individual National Plans of Recovery and Resilience. In the meantime, the go ahead is expected on June 24th European Council to the transfer of resources. “We are working as quickly as possible. But these are complex analyses”, recalled the Vice-President of the European Commission, Valdis Dombrovskis.
Once these steps have been overcome, probably in the first days of July, Brussels will finally be able to place Eurobonds on the market. There is no calendar yet, just as there is no news on the precise amount, but according to expectations, the first tranche of July should be around 50 billion euros for a total amount of 150 billion a year by 2026 “Our goal is to reach a wide range of investors and obtain optimal pricing conditions. The right timing is essential to achieve this goal,” explained the community spokesman Balazs Ujvari quoted by The Sun 24 hours.
HOW MUCH MONEY WILL ARRIVE AND WHEN
If everything goes as it should and above all on schedule, Brussels will distribute the first funds to the member states by the end of July. The first tranche of aid will be equal to 13% of the total resources that the countries will receive over the years. Almost 25 billion will therefore arrive in Italy euro out of a total of 190 billion allocated between loans and grants. In detail, of these 25 billion, 11 will come in the form of long-term loans (and with convenient rates) and 14 in the form of grants that our country will not have to repay.
WHAT ITALY DOES IN THE MEANTIME
In the meantime, the Italian government is preparing the first necessary measures to carry forward the projects contained in the Italian Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR).. To ensure that the incoming money is spent in the right way and at the right time, it is in fact necessary to streamline procedures and create fertile ground to allow future reforms, aid and incoming innovations, especially on the green and digital front, to take root .
Premier Mario Draghi brought together the control room of the Recovery Plan and met with the trade unions to settle the disputes over some of the provisions contained in the Simplifications decree. THEThe Council of Ministers should approve in the afternoon measures relating to procurement and commissioners who will take care of the works for which EU funds are destined, as well as the "governance" for the grounding of the 249 billion allocated (191,5 from Europe, 13 from the React Eu programme, 30,6 from Italy).
To meet the demands of the trade unions, the Government has decided to remove the disputed rule on the maximum reduction in procurement, while a "technical comparison" is envisaged for subcontracting. In any case, the Executive has put on the negotiating table the extension of the current threshold to 40% beyond the deadline of 30 June 2021. A sort of "middle ground" compared to the hypothesis of total liberalization strongly opposed by the trade unions.
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