Brussels, 04/05/2005 (Agence Europe) - On Wednesday, the Commission approved several State aid regimes:
a) In the United Kingdom, it authorised a regime aiming to promote the creation of enterprise capital funds for SMEs. In this type of funding, public money would only be used to shore up private capital and would be paid back by the fund, with interest plus a share of distributable profit. The investment levels, which are higher than the sums authorised in the Commission's communication on aid to investment, range between 250,000 pounds sterling (357,000 EUR) and 2 million pounds sterling (2.9 million EUR). As per the requirements, the British authorities have provided evidence of market failure in the region of 3 million EUR, as private investment capital companies give priority to larger-scale operations. The Commission notes that this is a pan-European phenomenon;
b) In France, the Commission has approved the public funding of a broadband network (of an overall budget of 85 million EUR and co-financed by Community funds) in Limousine. It found that public funding for bulk provision of infrastructure linked to the network was a compensation for a service of general economic interest, and not State aid. Following the call for tenders, an assignee will put together and manage the broadband infrastructure and provide various bulk services to the retail operators, but will not be able to sell services to the end users;
c) In Germany, the Commission has given its green light to an aid region in the region of 120 million EUR a year until 2007 in favour of newly-created SMEs, which use technological service centres or incubators. The German authorities have put together a regime whereby centres are responsible for transferring all aid to individual companies, offering them services such as office hire, consultancy, research premises or inter-company meetings;
d) In the Netherlands, the Commission has authorised public funding to the tune of 15 billion EUR in favour of the Dutch healthcare insurance system. The regime will provide a system of risk péréquation between insurers, and the authorities will support the transformation of the system by granting start-up capital to certain insurers. “I am delighted that consumers will in future be able to choose freely between several private insurance companies all offering basis healthcare insurance”, Neelie Kroes explained in a press release. This regime obliges insurers to accept everybody and prevents them from operating any level of differentiation via premiums. Current healthcare insurance companies, which will be transformed into normal private insurers, will be able to transfer their financial reserves into the new system in the form of start-up capital. This single liberalised market for healthcare will cover around 16 million people, compared to 6 million currently for the existing “private” healthcare insurance market.