Interim Prime Minister Ilie Bolojan announced on Monday that he asked the prefects from all over the country to request from the town halls updated information about the projects financed by the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR), in order to complete an extensive analysis on the status of the implementation of European investments.
Local authorities must submit data on the status of works, completion deadlines and execution schedules for the more than 10,000 projects financed through the PNRR, according to the head of the Executive.
“At 9:00 a.m. meetings were organized in the counties. The Ministry of Development made available to the town halls a guide and an electronic platform for collecting this data. (…)
By the middle of this week we must complete the analysis of the more than 10,000 projects financed by this program”, Ilie Bolojan sent in a message published on Facebook. Of these, over 5,000 are managed by the Ministry of Development, over 2,500 by the Ministry of Education and over 1,500 by the Ministry of the Environment.
The interim prime minister emphasized that most of the projects have local authorities and educational institutions throughout the country as beneficiaries. In parallel, the Government continues technical negotiations with the European Commission regarding the changes to the financing program.
According to Bolojan, the projects that will remain financed by European grants are those that can be completed by the end of August.
“We are clarifying which projects will remain funded by grants. They will be the ones that will be finished by the end of August; otherwise, we will lose the funding,” he warned.
For projects that cannot be finished on time, the Executive is analyzing the possibility of transferring the financing to the loan component, without blocking the works already in progress.
The Head of Government stated that the PNRR has a major impact on investments in Romania this year, the total amount exceeding 10 billion euros. Investments target important areas such as road and rail infrastructure, transport, education, health and thermal rehabilitation of blocks.
During a video conference with prefectures, the milestones and reforms undertaken through the PNRR were also analyzed. The government is preparing nine draft laws, worth a total of approximately 7.5 billion euros, to be submitted to Parliament by the end of the week.
Romania continues negotiations with the European Commission to adjust some objectives considered difficult to achieve. Among the reported problems is the delay in reforms in the railway sector, which could lead to the loss of part of the European funds allocated through the PNRR.
