Prime Minister Marcel Ciolacu declared on Wednesday evening that Romania has closed 71 milestones linked to the third payment request under the Recovery and Resilience Facility, and that talks are underway for another three milestones.
"There are certain rules at the Commission. Inflows to Romania at the moment are enough to allow us to make the necessary payments for the ongoing NRRP investments. We had 74 milestones, 3 are still under discussion: it's milestone No. 206 related to micro-enterprises, about ... how selections were made - and the Performance Monitoring and Assessment Agency is not the big issue, the discussions are about certain companies in the energy sector. The Commission asks questions, we provide the answers, explain why these things happened. Then they give us the final answer in a certain time interval; of course we have a discussion after the final answer and then we have six months to fix what we didn't close," said the prime minister, who stressed that Romania is among the seven countries that advanced to installment request number 3, while other member states are just at the second one.
"We have closed 71 out of 74 milestones linked to instalment request No. 3. Where is the problem? Where's the catastrophe? We are among the seven countries that have come as far as payment request number 3, the rest are at the second one," said Ciolacu .
The Save Romania Union (USR) launched on Wednesday a new MonitorNRRP.ro report, emphasizing that "missing the NRRP targets means that Romania currently has a financing deficit, as the difference between the value of the started projects and the actual money received is more than 10 billion euros."
"Payment request No. 3 was submitted in December 2023 and, according to the regulation of the Recovery and Resilience Mechanism, the assessment process should have ended after two months, followed by the actual disbursement of the money. Due to several milestones not being met as per the NRRP commitments, and to certain unfulfilled reforms, this payment request has not yet been approved seven months since submission," the USR report states.
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