The application for payment 4 under the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR) will be submitted around 15 December and in February 2.62 billion euro in grants could be disbursed, while at least 500 million euro could still come from application for payment 3, Minister of Investments and European Projects Dragos Pislaru told a specialist conference on Tuesday.
"The application for payment 4 will be submitted as soon as we are past the CCR [the Constitutional Court of Romania] decision of 10 December. Thus, practically the milestone related to the pollution tax is part of the application for payment 4. The rest of the documents are prepared and we will probably submit the application for payment 4 around 15 December. For the application for payment 4 you will see that it will probably be the fastest application in the history of the PNRR, because this is how things are done, you do not send things and then see what the European Commission thinks. You pre-negotiate everything, you know exactly what you are sending, why you are sending it, how you are sending it and I expect that around February this money, 2.62 billion euro in grants, will come in," Pislaru said, Agerpres reports.
In respect to the application for payment 3, the minister said he expects at least 500 million euro to be disbursed from the suspended amount of 860 million euro.
He underscored that 2026 is the PNRR year because it ends on 31 August and investments must be completed, while European funds must be used wisely on the existing projects.
"We have 10 billion euro to spend under the PNRR and this means the working assumption is that 15 billion euro will come into the country. (...) In the context in which Romania has finally understood at government level and is starting to know why it does what it does, so that under deficit conditions it protects the budget and uses European money, these things are seen very clearly in the ratio between expenditure from European money and national money. And we are in this situation in which we do not need an additional recovery plan. The recovery plan is to use this European money wisely and use it for the projects you have. (...) So, my first thesis is that as long as we spend this European money, we cannot, on the numbers, enter an economic recession," the minister said at the 6th edition of News.ro - ROINVEST event.
He underlined that nothing in the PNRR will be revised any more, as there is a final version and a very clear plan with everything that must be done and when it must be done. Three more applications for payment still need to be submitted, there is a simplified version of the milestones and the portfolios from the line ministries have been collected, indexed in a database that has been made public and which contains 21,000 projects.
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