Government ups RRP payments

The Portuguese Government has announced that it will increase the payment of investments from Portugal’s Recovery and Resilience Programme by 10 percentage points to 23% to “boost” the execution of projects aimed at making Portugal’s economy and business network more dynamic, digital, innovative and sustainable.

The announcement was made this week by the Secretary of State for the Economy, Pedro Cilínio.
“We will increase the amount of money to be transferred from the RRP. One of the measures that we are implementing is to increase the funds we are forwarding by 10 percentage points so that all the (companies/consortia) have an additional amount of funds so that investments (in projects) can move forward”.
He emphasised that the Government intended to “complete the negotiation process and select 53 programmes for contracts shortly. Regarding the RRP we have a rule of forwarding 13% and we have identified the possibility of increasing the amount of funding to be transferred by 10 percentage points on the initial amount that the programmes can receive.”
The monies will be paid out in two tranches because “we’ll get 13% up front and we will apply this 13% and then make a second tranche available to be delivered to companies”, he said.
According to Pedro Cilínio, “This means that within a maximum of three months after the contracting, a programme will have 23% of the RRP funds in its hands to boost the execution of these projects which are very important”.
“At the end of the day we want our companies to continue to innovate, invest in sustainability, and obviously we want these funds to be awarded to companies that are on the road towards this”, he said.
On February 17 it was announced that RRP payouts had topped €1.4Bn and that 95,800 candidates had been approved.

Photo: Lusa Tiago Petinga