On the evening of Monday 7 December, the representatives of the European Parliament and the Council of the European Union reached provisional political agreement on revision of the InvestEU programme in light of the Covid-19 pandemic (see EUROPE 12617/22). The programme will succeed the ‘Juncker’ investment plan from the end of 2020.
As requested by Member States, the number of investment components will be limited to the four envisaged at the beginning of the process. As a result of the Interinstitutional Agreement on the post-2020 EU budget, the overall budget agreed by the Council of the EU has been increased slightly, from €23.8 billion to €26.2 billion (see EUROPE 12599/2). The breakdown is as follows: - €9.9 billion (37% of the total) for sustainable infrastructure; - €6.6 billion (25.1%) for research, innovation and digital transition; - €6.9 billion (26.3%) for SMEs; - €2.8 billion (10,7%) for the social sector and skills.
The European Investment Fund, the EIB Group’s financial instrument used to implement InvestEU, may also be increased by €375 million.
José Manuel Fernandes (EPP, Portugal), the European Parliament co-rapporteur on the InvestEU programme, told EUROPE on Tuesday 8 December that, in budgetary terms, “we have succeeded in optimising the financial portfolio by reusing the guarantee from existing financial instruments” under the Juncker plan.
“Another important point” he added, is that “it will be possible to opt to use the money from the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF) in the national segment” of the new programme. The budget guarantee for InvestEU will be based on the EU budget, but also partly on public entities at Member State level, such as national development banks.
It is hoped that InvestEU will mobilise an additional €400 billion of private investment during the period 2021-2027.
Fernandes also pointed out that, even in the absence of dedicated investment components, investments made through InvestEU will be able to support strategic investments and contribute to the solvency of European companies affected by the Covid-19 pandemic. We’ve managed to bypass the issue of ‘solvency’, which is a taboo subject for some Member States, by talking about the option of providing capital to companies in financial difficulty solely because of the coronavirus, he said.
In a press statement, Nils Torvalds (Finland) and the Ondřej Kovařík (Czech Republic) from the Renew Europe group stated that the InvestEU programme will have to contribute 30% of its funding to EU climate action and 60% of the budget for the ‘sustainable infrastructure’ component will have to be dedicated to the same programme. The text of the new regulation will require sustained investments not to infringe European climate priorities (the ‘do no harm principle’). Reference to the European taxonomy on sustainable finance will, however, only be made in the recitals of the new legislation.
On Tuesday, technical discussions to translate the political agreement into legislation continued; it will not be put to a plenary vote in the European Parliament until 2021. (Original version in French by Mathieu Bion)