Over 9,400 Romanian companies have applied for investment grants with an aggregated value of RON 5.6 billion (EUR 1.15 bln) under the third measure of the Government's EUR 1.5 bln economic support package, the Economy Ministry announced.

The amount is twice the budget the Government set for this measure last year.

The application period for investment grants ends at the end of this week (January 29), after which the applications will be evaluated and ranked based on their score. Thus, not all applicants will get the financing.

The allocation of investment grants is different from the other two measures - microgrants and working capital grants - where the distribution was on the first-come-first-served principle. In the end, the Government increased the funds for these two measures to cover all the requests.

For the EUR 2,000 micro-grants (measure 1), local microenterprises sent 29,250 requests totaling RON 283 mln, of which 16,504 firms have already received the grants - RON 160 mln. For measure 2 - working capital grants, 22,226 applications were submitted with a total value of over RON 5.246 bln, of which 12,887 have been processed. So far, some 2,774 companies have received working capital grants worth RON 967 mln.

The Economy Ministry must first complete the evaluation of applications for working capital grants before starting to evaluate those for investment grants.

andrei@romania-insider.com

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