Portugal asks Brussels for another revision to RRP
Portugal has asked Brussels for another alteration to projects under the Recovery and Resilience Plan which is nearing its end.
Portugal submitted the final request to Brussels on Tuesday for the revision.
It is the seventh such request. According to information obtained by the online news source ECO, this option stems from a suggestion by the European Commission itself, aiming to avoid the need to return funds due to non-compliance over targets and milestones.
The information that Portugal has proceeded with more changes is on the European Commission’s page dedicated to the Recovery and Resilience Facility.
Portugal has so far benefitted from 116 reform projects financed by the Technical Support Instrument or by its predecessor, the Structural Reform Support Programme.
The support addressed a broad range of policy areas, including public administration, better regulation, public spending, financial literacy, healthcare and education. A particular focus has been on digitalisation in both private and public sectors.
The Recovery and Resilience Plan (RRP) underwent several ‘reprogrammings’ throughout its duration.
The first and most significant, in May 2023, increased the funding from €16.6Bn to €22.2Bn. This represents a 33.7% increase, resulting not only from a reinforcement of the subsidies to which Portugal was entitled, but also from a more substantial use of the loan component—an additional €3.2Bn.
The country would now have to meet 501 targets and milestones, compared to the previous 341 (one of the highest figures among the beneficiaries of the Recovery and Resilience Facility).
This increase in the PRR resulted, on the one hand, from the additional subsidies that Portugal was entitled to due to the recalculation of the distribution of subsidies, which depended on the variation of GDP in 2020 and 2021 (€1.6Bn), from the 785 million euros relating to the REPowerEU initiative, but also from the national decision to increase the tranche of loans that Portugal would resort to.
But after that, there were five more (August 1, 2024; February 1; July 18; October 31, 2025), the most recent submitted on March 31 and approved on May 18, the same day Portugal also submitted its ninth payment request of €2.3Bn.
Throughout the reprogramming process, Portugal has removed projects from the Recovery and Resilience Plan (PRR) due to a lack of guarantees regarding their timely completion: the expansion of the red and violet lines of the Lisbon Metro, Lisbon’s Eastern ‘Todos-os-Santos’ Hospital, the Pomarão Water Intake, the Algarve desalination plant, and the Crato dam.
Portugal did so assuring that these projects were secured and would be financed through alternative funding sources such as the European Investment Bank, the State Budget, and Portugal 2030.
To this end, a decree-law has already been approved to avoid the risk of double financing, and a reprogramming of Portugal 2030 has been submitted to Brussels, which, without altering the allocations, allows for the reallocation of funds to safeguard some of these projects that were removed from the RRP.
Source: ECO Online
