The European Court of Auditors admits cases of double financing with funds from the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRM), which finances the PRR, and other community programs, in particular in electric car charging points in Portugal.
“The Court concludes that the systems created and implemented by the Commission and Member States are still not sufficient to adequately mitigate the increased risk of double financing between the RRF, cohesion policy funds and the Connecting Europe Facility. Taking into account the inadequacies of the control environment, it is difficult to detect double financing,” indicates the European Court of Auditors (ECA) in a report published this Monday.
In the document, the TCE auditor explains that “in the case of specific projects without a precise location in the grant contract, as […] At electric vehicle charging stations in France and Portugal, the Commission can only check double financing. [do MRR e do MIE] at a later stage during execution, after exact locations have been determined.”
Therefore, “the risk of paying twice for the same thing increases,” the TCE highlights in the information now released.
For this audit, the court examined the legal framework and interviewed officials from the institution and the Member States that implement these funds, after verifying that the European Commission “introduced additional milestones or adjusted existing milestones related to dual financing to seven Member States – Belgium, Ireland, Cyprus, Austria, Portugal, Finland and Sweden –”, but this was only after “having disbursed payments worth around four billion euros” from the MRR.
The report comes after, in the middle of this month in another document, the court revealed that some milestones and goals had been set ““were not satisfactorily fulfilled” by Portugal in MRR paymentswhich finances the Recovery and Resilience Plan (PRR), especially in electric vehicle charging point projects.
It is up to the European Commission to evaluate such suspicions and follow up on them, and may request additional information or additional actions to meet objectives and milestones.
Now it is also mentioned in the report that, “during this audit, the court found that, as a precaution, the Czech Republic, France, Italy and Portugal avoided combining the MRR with other EU programs for specific measures“, an option that “Helps mitigate the risk of double financing“.
Created to minimize the economic and social consequences of the covid-19 pandemic and facilitate digital and ecological transitions, the MRR finances PRR, like the Portuguese one, for reforms and investments until the end of 2026, for a total of 800 billion euros in current expenses. prices.
According to the ECA accounts, the post-pandemic recovery fund supports, however, areas that have already been covered by other community funds, namely Cohesion and the “Connecting Europe” Facility, with 358 billion euros and 34 billion million euros respectively between 2021 and 2027.
In addition, the recovery funds finance similar actions in transport and energy infrastructure, for which €648 billion of MRR is available.
In total, the Portuguese PRR is worth 22.2 billion euros, with 16.3 billion euros in grants and 5.9 billion euros in MRR loans, which refer to 376 investments and 87 reforms.
This amount corresponds to 8.37% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of Portugal.
The Portuguese PRR allocates around 57% of funds to climate objectives and around 22% to the country’s digital transition.
To date, Portugal has already received €6.84 billion in grants and €1.65 billion in loans, with a plan implementation rate of 23%, according to European Commission data available on its website.
Source: Observadora
