The greatest hurdles in absorbing funds earmarked from the EU’s Recovery and Resilience Fund are the loans. One can put it down to bureaucracy or lack of serious investor interest, but the fact remains that projects in sectors which the European Commission would like to give priority to remain unwanted.
In July, the request for a sixth installment of fund money only involved subsidies, not loans. According to the fund’s rules, €9 billion worth of funding contracts should have been signed. The actual number was slightly over €7.5 billion.
According to government officials, the dearth of loan agreements is due to the fact that projects show a lack of digital maturity, or use of artificial intelligence. According to Eurostat data, small and medium-sized enterprises using AI technologies are 13.5% in the EU and 9.8% in Greece.