The Commission\u2019s Executive Vice-President for Cohesion and Reforms, Raffaele Fitto, one the officials overseeing the recovery spending, defended Spain, saying: \u201cWhile the payment of pensions and other forms of current expenditure is not eligible for NextGenEU or Recovery and Resilience (RRF) funds, it could be possible for Member States to temporarily use some of the liquidity from RRF disbursements to cover other budgetary outlays.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cSuch cash management operations by Member States are temporary and have no impact on the protection of EU funds,\u201d he added. Commission officials said that any spending that was not included in the recovery plan will have to be eventually returned.<\/p>\n
Transparency criticism<\/p>\n
It’s not the first time that the EU\u2019s post-Covid scheme, which is made up of a total of \u20ac360 billion in non-repayable grants and \u20ac217 billion in cheap loans, has been criticized over weak transparency and controls.<\/p>\n
The European Court of Auditors (ECA) said on Tuesday that the findings of its Spanish counterpart confirmed the misgivings already raised about the fund.<\/p>\n
\u201c[ECA] has consistently underlined the need for more systematic reporting on actual costs and on the final use of funds,\u201d the body wrote in a statement.<\/p>\n
EU countries request funding from the Commission upon the fulfilment of specific targets and reforms.\u00a0Critics say that the departure from previous EU programs, where funds were reimbursed only after invoices were submitted, makes it harder to track the money.<\/p>\n
These concerns were raised by Michael J\u00e4ger, the president of the Taxpayers Association of Europe (TAE), a body that stands against wasteful government spending. \u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWe demand, first, that any misconduct be consistently prosecuted where appropriate. Second, we need full transparency. And third, any funds that were not used for their intended purpose must be repaid,\u201d he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Commission\u2019s Executive Vice-President for Cohesion and Reforms, Raffaele Fitto, one the officials overseeing the recovery spending, defended…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":23052,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[12258,12259,11427,3220,1704,865,12260,12261,5649,8477,12262,12263,11328,12264,17,11142,6707],"class_list":{"0":"post-23051","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-spain","8":"tag-alice-weidel","9":"tag-budget","10":"tag-debt","11":"tag-digital","12":"tag-finance","13":"tag-germany","14":"tag-liquidity","15":"tag-negotiations","16":"tag-payments","17":"tag-pensions","18":"tag-raffaele-fitto","19":"tag-regions-cohesion","20":"tag-regulation","21":"tag-resilience","22":"tag-spain","23":"tag-the-netherlands","24":"tag-transparency"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23051","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23051"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23051\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23052"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23051"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23051"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23051"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}