Spain has spent around €20 billion of the grants from the Recovery and Resilience Mechanism (RRM), the main instrument of the Next Generation EU, in the first three years of implementation.
These are the estimates of the Commission itself and set out in its latest revision of the Budgetary Plan sent by the Spanish government in October. Brussels has already disbursed €37 billion of the €80 billion expected up to 2026. In other words, a quarter of what was planned has been executed so far.
Specifically, Brussels’ calculations, to which Vozpópuli has had access, point to the fact that the expenditure financed by public administrations
of the RRM by public administrations stood at 0.2% of GDP in 2021,
0.4% of GDP in 2022 and will have risen to 1% of GDP by the end of this year. In total, 1.6% of GDP in the first three years, between 2021 and 2022.
years, of the programme, according to expert sources, these figures provided by the Commission are the closest to what the government stopped publishing in September 2021, the execution in national accounting terms.
The government only reports the obligations, commitments and authorisations, which do not necessarily imply expenditure or
involve expenditure or disbursement to the final recipient. In other words, the project has been implemented but, nevertheless, it is possible that the money has not yet left the public administrations..
The lack of transparency in the implementation of this multi-million dollar programme has been evident from almost the beginning of the Plan. Now, however, the European Commission itself has pointed the finger at the government for its delay in the publication of the list of the 100 largest beneficiaries of these EU funds, an information that countries are obliged to publish since this year, and only four have not even have not published it even once (including Spain).
