Romania could collect approximately 3 billion euros from the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR), related to payment requests 3 and 4, provided that some of the outstanding milestones have been met and negotiations with the European Commission are ongoing, said on Monday the Minister of Investments and European Projects, Dragos Pislaru, present in the Senate at the debate on the simple motion against him.
He specified that the authorities are trying to recover more than half of the amounts suspended under Request no. 3.
"Thus, major projects, such as the Moldovan highway, A7, or hospitals, are now mostly financed by grants. We managed to save strategic projects, which were obviously not able to be completed on time, by moving them to cohesion policy funds, or to SAFE, such as nine hospitals or the highway ends that ensure the connection with Moldova and Ukraine. If in October 2025 only 29% of the amounts spent came from grants, after the renegotiation led by me, we increased this share to 46.78% reported from the value of the plan. In 2025, of the total payments for investments, 71% of the money that went to the beneficiaries was from non-reimbursable funds", mentioned Pislaru.
According to him, Romania currently has a NRRP worth 21.4 billion euros, of which 13.57 billion euros are grants. So far, the country has collected 10.7 billion euros.
"So far, Romania has collected 10.7 billion euros. At the moment, we have 4 payment requests under discussion: 3, 4, 5 and 6. Payment request number 3 is the one that generated the greatest emotions. It was already submitted when I took office, being 809 million euros that were suspended by the European Commission due to four unfulfilled milestones. And the most difficult milestone in Request 3, milestone 215, the one regarding the special pension reform, was finally closed", Dragos Pislaru emphasized.
According to the Minister of Investments and European Projects, even though the initial deadline was exceeded, Romania has prepared "an exceptional legal plea", and with this argument submitted to Brussels, it hopes to recover over half of the suspended funds.
"To sum up, my objective for Request 3 is that more than half of the suspended money, i.e. over 400 million euros, be recouped. The final response from the Commission will come by the end of this month. Moving on, Request for Payment 4, worth 2.62 billion euros, which we were able to submit immediately after the revision of the NRRP, on December 15, 2025, is the request we are focusing on the most today. And after the adoption of the budget, we close the milestone related to green budgeting, and the payment is expected at the end of this month, confirmation of the payment by the Commission. The realistic estimate is that Romania, for requests 3 and 4, will collect 3 billion euros, and if these are not results, then I do not know exactly what else we can ask from MIPE and the current Government", the minister also said.
The majority of the 3 billion euros is in the non-reimbursable component, he said.
"For the rest of the year, we have Payment Request 5, which will be submitted on March 31, 1.18 billion euros, and Request 6, at the end, 8.8 billion euros. For the first time, we have published the complete picture of all projects in the NRRP. We are talking about over 21,000 projects, at national level, which you can view online, at any time, on the ministry's website. From structural reforms, to the construction of schools, highways, water systems, canals and so on. The NRRP is not something abstract. It is an amount of investment that covers the entire country and there is no administrative-territorial unit that does not have ongoing projects on the NRRP. When I came to the ministry, in the middle of 2025, I found that in the period 2021-2024, in four years, Romania had only drawn 4 billion euros in economy. In just 8 months of mandate, we managed to inject another 6 billion euros into the economy, recovering enormously from the delay", mentioned Dragos Pislaru.
The Senate rejected, in the plenary session on Monday, the simple motion against the Minister of Investments and European Projects. There were 41 votes in favor and 73 votes against the motion.
Entitled "Dragos Pislaru, Ciolos' technocrat and the minister without
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