Ursula von der Leyen’s European Commission has cut €1.1 billion from the fifth payment of Next Generation EU funds to Spain. This payment, which totals €23 billion (€8 billion in grants and the rest in loans), has been reduced because Spain lacks the votes in Congress to pass measures like the diesel tax increase—intended to equalize it with gasoline prices—one of the key reforms demanded by Brussels. This comes despite…

Spain’s Minister of Economy, Carlos Cuerpo, has been stuck for months in negotiations with Brussels over the fifth payment of the Next Gen EU funds, totaling €23.9 billion: €8 billion in grants and €15.9 billion in soft loans. Because Pedro Sánchez’s government did not request the loans from Brussels until March 2023, Spain has only received €47.96 billion in grants and €340 million in loans so far. This means a…

In its Audit Report on the measures of the Administration on the implementation of the Recovery and Resilience Plan, sent this week to Las Cortes – and reported by the newspaper El Mundo – the Court of Auditors calls for more transparency: “There are no published data that allow us to have knowledge of the funds that reach the final recipients”, says the Court of Auditors, despite the execution reports…

The official data shows that the final execution of the amount received by Spain is very low (18%), that the awarding of projects is decreasing (45% in 2021; only 39% in 2022 and barely 20% on 31 October 2023); and that the vast majority (88%) of the money for the projects (61 of those 100) goes to public institutions (Autonomous Regions, City Councils and public bodies such as Adif, for…

Until now, the public sector has been the main beneficiary of European Next Generation EU funds. After dodging the issue for several months, the government unveiled the list of the top 100 beneficiaries of these funds mid-afternoon on Friday, as the European Commission had demanded. And, according to the official statement from the Ministry of Economic Affairs, the major recipients of these funds have been public entities, as 60% of…

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…

The European Commission (EC) has endorsed the addendum to the extension of the Recovery Plan and accepts that Spain replaces the commitment to charge for the use of motorways with an increase in rail freight transport. Thus, the EC has given its approval to the addendum to the extension of the Recovery Plan by which Spain requests another €94 billion, between credits and aid, from the Next Generation programme and…