Brussels, 16/03/2016 (Agence Europe) - On Friday 17 June, the European Commission announced that it has selected 195 transport projects in the framework of the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) worth a total of €6.7 billion in order to boost digitalisation and decarbonisation of transport.
The Commission says the investments will enable further public and private co-financing to be raised totalling €9.6 million. The countries eligible for cohesion fund cash for 2014-2020, namely Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Greece, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia, have received nearly 85% of the total funding available with the aim of reducing infrastructure disparities.
Initially, €7.6 billion was available for the second call for tender, but some member states submitted projects that were not eligible for various reasons, said a European source. The Commission therefore decided to issue a third wave of calls for tender and rescheduled some of the funding still available, explained Commissioner Violeta Bulc in answer to a question from this newsletter.
The commissioner welcomed the high usage of the available funding, which stands at 90%. This was described as highly satisfying because there were fears at the very start about potential errors in the submitted projects, explained an institutional source. Several sources suggest the amount of money allocated to the third call for tender will be known next week.
There are mixed outcomes in the projects submitted by participing member states. We are told that Hungary, Malta, Latvia and Greece responded particularly well to the second call for tender, but not Cyprus because the economic crisis means that it cannot provide the co-financing (the EU contributes up to 85%).
A total of 427 projects were submitted for the second call for tender (see EUROPE 11492). (Original version in French by Pascal Hansens)