EU Commission approves RRP tranche of €1.6Bn for Portugal

The European Commission has approved the payment of €1.16Bn to Portugal to finance its national Recovery and Resilience Plan (RRP) of which €554.4 are grants and €609 million are loans.

European experts have given a positive preliminary evaluation of the Portuguese government’s request made two months ago and the transfer, which should arrive in Lisbon in April, it waiting to be rubber stamped by the other 27 member states.
The money is from the Recovery and Resilience Mechanism (RRM), the main instrument to NextGenrationEU which got its name for being a future-oriented fund. In other words, NGEU will not only try to fix the consequences of the pandemic, but it will also make investments in the EU’s long-term future. For this reason, there are specific recognised EU priorities that Next Generation EU will focus on.
The funds are the investment that are behind the EU’s determination to make Europe a digital, sustainable and more resilient place.
The request by Portugal had been made on 25 January after the government showed that it had met the 38 targets and measures agreed with the EU commission.
“With its request, the Portuguese authorities presented complete and detailed documents of proof that show they have met the 38 targets”, explained the EU, insisting that it had “exhaustively checked the information before issuing its preliminary positive evaluation report.”
This is the second tranche of the RRP that Portugal will receive. In August last year the EC delivered €2.2Bn of RRP, around 13% of the total €13.9Bn of grants and €2.7Bn in loans that Portugal will receive by 2026.
The Next Generation EU recovery plan will distribute €750Bn between EU member states. The NGEU budget will work on top of the EU long-term budget of €1.074Tn for the 2021-2027 multi-annual financial framework.
Specifically, it is a COVID-19 dedicated recovery package channelled through the EU long-term budget between 2021 and 2023.
The 2021-2027 long-term EU budget, together with the Next Generation EU budget, amounts to an unprecedented €1.8Tn of funding to support the Covid-19 recovery and the EU’s long-term priorities across different policy areas.
The centrepiece of this is NGEU is the Recovery and Resilience Facility that will be responsible for providing €672.5Bn in loans and grants to support reforms and investments in each Member State.