Romania’s acting prime minister Ilie Bolojan stated in a Facebook post that the government's main priority in July and August is the absorption of European funds under the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR), with Romania having to collect over EUR 4.5 billion in the form of grants. The six laws to be approved for the absorption of the funds will be passed to lawmakers after last-minute consultations with the European Commission, PM Bolojan announced.

According to PM Bolojan, the funds are essential for financing major projects, such as the Moldova Highway, the electrification of railway lines, the construction of hospitals, schools, and nurseries, the thermal rehabilitation of apartment buildings, and investments carried out by local authorities.

"We still have to carry out several reforms that actually involve the adoption of laws," the prime minister said.

He specified that, since the government can no longer adopt these measures by engaging in liability or through emergency ordinances, the Parliament will have to be convened in extraordinary sessions to debate and adopt the normative acts.

Among the most important pending legislative projects are the law on unitary remuneration, the law on incompatibilities, the law on rewarding the staff of the Ministry of Finance for improving the collection of budget revenues, the law on civil service, the Urban Planning Code, and the law on decarbonization of the heating and cooling sector.

The value of the tranches of money associated with these reforms ranges between EUR 770 and 972 million for each legislative package.

The prime minister announced that, by the end of this week, consultations with the European Commission will be completed, and the draft laws will be submitted to the parliamentary groups and the leadership of the two Chambers of Parliament, so that they can be adopted in the second half of July.

The projects under the PNRR must be completed by August 31. In its current form, Romania's National Recovery and Resilience Plan has a total value of EUR 21.41 billion, of which EUR 13.57 billion is grants and EUR 7.84 billion is loans. Romania has reached over EUR 9 billion received under the PNRR, after the fourth payment request was fully approved.

The stakes remain very high, however. Payment requests number five and six must be submitted in the near future, and approximately EUR 10 billion of funding depends on them, as Dragoș Pîslaru, the interim minister of European Funds, recently explained.

iulian@romania-insider.com

(Photo source: Gov.ro)