Cyprus will on Friday submit a formal request for the second and third tranche of payments from the EU’s Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF) which once granted will bring payments up to €400 million to date, an official with the finance ministry said on Thursday.

“We are just hours away from simultaneously filing the second and third request for payments from the European facility, involving the disbursement of €152.3 million,” said Andreas Zachariades, acting general director at the Directorate General Growth (finance ministry).

He was speaking at an event headlined ‘2^nd Annual Event for the Cyprus Recovery and Resilience Plan’.

The official said that only last week the Council of the European Union gave the nod to Cyprus’ revised plan, submitted to the European Commission back in September.

“The adoption of this revised plan, and the successful completion of 16 and 22 targets and milestones in, respectively, our second and third payment requests, now take us to the submission of the request for the disbursement of the €152.3 million.”

Once this payment goes through, Cyprus will have cumulatively received some €400 million from the RRF.

The island is also among the first ten member states to file a third request for payment, Zachariades noted.

Through the RRF, Cyprus can draw total funds totalling €1.22 billion by the year 2026. This, the official stressed, depends on the timely achievement of the targets and milestones included in the Cyprus plan.

The Cyprus Resilience and Recovery Plan is being implemented by more than 70 organisations – in the central government and the broader public sector.

The RRF is a temporary instrument that is the centrepiece of NextGenerationEU – the EU’s plan to emerge stronger and more resilient from the current crisis.

Through the Facility, the European Commission raises funds by borrowing on the capital markets (issuing bonds on behalf of the EU). These are then available to its member states, to implement ambitious reforms and investments.

The Facility entered into force on February 19, 2021. It finances reforms and investments in EU member states made from the start of the pandemic in February 2020 until December 31, 2026. Countries can receive financing up to a previously agreed maximum amount.

To benefit from support under the Facility, EU governments have submitted national recovery and resilience plans, outlining the reforms and investments they will implement by end-2026, with clear milestones and targets. The plans had to allocate at least 37 per cent of their budget to green measures and 20 per cent to digital measures.

The RRF is performance based – the European Commission only pays out the amounts to each country when they have achieved the agreed milestones and targets towards completing the reforms and investments included in their plan.

Courtesy of Cyprus Mail | News