The European Commission announced on Wednesday 19 January the completion of payments under the European Union Solidarity Fund (EUSF) amounting to €385.5 million for 19 Member States to deal with the consequences of the coronavirus pandemic.
This sum is the final addition to the €132.7 million paid in 2020 for those Member States that requested an advance.
In March 2021 the European Commission proposed an envelope of nearly €530 million in EUSF assistance for 17 Member States and 3 EU accession countries.
The following month, the EU Council and the European Parliament approved this proposal as soon as possible (see EUROPE 12722/15).
The Member States to whom the aid relates are: Austria, Belgium, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Portugal, Romania and Spain. The three candidate Member States that have benefited from the EUSF are: Albania, Montenegro and Serbia (for the latter, the signature of the delegation agreement is in progress).
The European Parliament has been calling for the revision of the EUSF for several months in order to simplify it and speed up payment procedures (see EUROPE 12721/11).
The React-EU initiative mobilised in favour of Poland. On Tuesday, the Commission announced a payment of €136 million to six operational programmes of the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) in Poland as part of the cohesion policy’s response to the consequences of the coronavirus, React-EU.
As of 10 January, €39.4 billion of the €50.6 billion planned in the initiative had already been allocated (see EUROPE 12871/22).
To consult the Commission’s scoreboard: https://bit.ly/3hHx3rv (Original version in French by Pascal Hansens)