The Minister of European Affairs, Cohesion Policies and Pnrr Raffaele Fitto at a press conference held yesterday at Palazzo Chigi, denied the delays in the program of the National Recovery and Resilience Plan. « The oppositions talk about delays but the concept of delay seems questionable to me, what delay are we talking about? I cannot understand what you are referring to. I would like to hear some specific arguments about the delay and whether there is a delay, but I think this is an exercise that is not useful for the country», said Fitto. For the minister, therefore, no delay and also the deadline for the fourth installment, set at June 30, 2023, is merely indicative. “The European Regulation – explained the minister – does not provide for binding deadlines for the submission of payment requests but is limited to establishing that each Member State, once the objectives defined in the Plan have been achieved, can submit the request twice a year” . About the third installment, worth 19 billion, and the fourth, worth 16 billion, Fitto explained: “The value of Italy’s delay” in the Pnrr “must be circumscribed and identified. I bring objective data and await the denial: there are three countries (Italy, Greece and Spain, ed.) that requested the payment of the third installment. If we are late, what is the situation of the others?” specified the holder of the department of Largo Chigi.
The minister explained that in the third installment we are “in the verification phase of some detailed aspects from the point of view of interpretation”. In the fourth, work was carried out that “aims to avoid a long verification phase”. Fitto reiterated the point several times, noting how the government worked with the Commission to revise the objectives of the fourth tranche. This change was approved in the late afternoon of Monday, July 10th, which is why the control room was called at the last minute. So no emergency call to deal with the Pnrr delays, but just an appointment that took place after the Brussels ok. “We are facing several false news: there was no urgent call-up from the control room, which happened at the end of yesterday afternoon because we had technical approval from Europe, so the call-up only started then”. Guarantees of time to receive the fourth installment “no one can give you. We set up a preliminary work defining which objectives needed to be corrected to achieve the result and thus avoid having a reduction, with partial payment of the installment, and thus avoiding a very long verification phase. I would also like to say, hoping it is not interpreted in a controversial way, that we are working on the third and fourth installments on objectives and situations that do not concern the decisions of this government. We are working to step in and initiate fixes.
Fitto also responded to those who had been asking for some time to be accountable to the Chamber: «I will go to Parliament on the 18th» of July «for the half-yearly report, and I think I have already been to Parliament several times not comparable to what happened in the two years previous. The question of delays is particular: I still haven’t heard a precise reference to a delay attributable to us that is objective”. that the debate is based on proposals, but every day I hear things against it: I think Italy needs a serious confrontation, with constructive proposals, instead of sterile polemics that serve no one. We must work to achieve an objective that is not of the government, but of the country”.
Source: IL Tempo
Emma Fitzgerald is an accomplished political journalist and author at The Nation View. With a background in political science and international relations, she has a deep understanding of the political landscape and the forces that shape it.
