CPCI concerned over low RRP execution rate

The Portuguese Confederation of Construction and Real Estate has criticised the government for its “pretty low” execution rate in distributing European ‘bazooka’ funds to projects in the sector.

The CPCI has made its concerns known on the funding for the projects relevant for the sector to the parliamentary sub-commission that monitors the distribution of European Recovery and Resilience funds.
The Vice-President of the CPCI, Ricardo Gomes stressed that the confederation is “quite worried” about the “fairly low” execution rate and that it could not scrutinise all of the projects financed by the RRP because of a lack of information, while saying that the latest situation on the known projects left him “concerned”.
Among the reasons that the execution of the projects financed by the RRP has been sluggish are, according to Ricardo Gomes, the costs of the candidacies (budgets) which have not been updated to take into account the increase in prices of materials which have resulted in candidates not moving forward or pulling out, resulting in “ghost competitions”, while the other issue has been “leaving things to the last minute” which doesn’t work because putting together applications take time and the deadlines are very tight.
He showed the commission members data on the RRP execution rate to 19 January and told the Portuguese MPs that “the general situation in terms of sums and the timeframes to execution of the RRP “concerns us”.
According to the latest operational state-of-play for the RRP, the beneficiaries of the funds by January 18 had only received 9% of the total, equivalent of €1.4Bn, highlighting payments to public entities (€469 million), public companies (€289 million), schools (€212 million), companies (€157 million), and families. (€129 million)
To date, approvals for the allocation and disbursement of funds has totalled €11.564 million (69%), with €3.995Bn to public entities, €2.830Bn for private companies and €2.209 million to public companies.
To January, 147,032 candidacies were submitted and 93,320 have been approved.

Image: PEXELS: David McBee