SANTA CRUZ DE TENERIFE, Sep. 6 (EUROPE PRESS) –
The Government of the Canary Islands will have executed 506 million euros from the React-EU program by the end of this year, which represents just over 80% of the total, according to the Vice President and Minister of Finance, Budgets and European Affairs, Román Rodríguez, on Tuesday. , during a forum on the Next Generation EU instrument, organized by the Prensa Ibérica group in Tenerife.
The vice president recalled that the execution period for the React-EU funds ends on December 31, 2023 and specified that 312 million were executed in year 21 and that another 194 million will be formalized during this same year, with which they would only remain pending 124 million euros for the last year.
The Government of the Canary Islands will thus comply, in a timely manner, with the forecasts for the execution of React-EU, one of the funds that, together with the Recovery and Resilience Mechanism (MRR), make up the extraordinary European financial instrument Next Generation and that is specifically, it has earmarked for the protection of economic sectors and essential public services.
Rodríguez was equally confident in executing the approximately 1,750 million euros that the Government of the Canary Islands will have to manage directly under the MRR, for which he will have until the end of 2026, according to a note from the Ministry.
In any case, the vice-president relativized the weight of these extraordinary European funds that the Canary Islands will receive to boost the transformation of its economy — some 2,380 million — and compared them with the 5,075 million that will be transferred to the archipelago from ordinary European funds. of the Multiannual Financial Framework 2021-27.
“The resources of the Next Generation are important -Rodríguez said- but they are more so because of their finalist orientation than because of their amount, since the ordinary funds that we have assigned until the year 2027 will be more than double”, he commented.
In this sense, the Vice President highlighted the guidelines approved by the European authorities for the execution of extraordinary funds, which seek to boost economic transformation through firm support for digitization or the fight against climate change, among other objectives.
The vice president clarified that the 1,750 million euros of the MRR do not include the so-called PERTE or the ministerial calls of the Government of Spain, which will also add investment for the islands, although the autonomous Executive does not know the exact amounts.
Precisely, among the strategic public-private tractor projects on which the Government of the Canary Islands is working with the private sector are digital technologies for the tourism sector; the transformation of the Canarian ports; the evolution of the primary sector towards the blue economy or the accelerating infrastructures of the audiovisual sector.
AN EFFECTIVE RESPONSE
Rodríguez valued the response that the European Union (EU) has given to the economic crisis derived from the pandemic, “diametrically different from the one it gave in the previous one, in which all its public policies were based on austerity, cuts and men in black”.
On this occasion, he added, “the budgetary and monetary policy has been expansive, which has made it possible to face the social costs of a very deep crisis.”
This procedure has allowed governments, for example, to finance ERTEs –as the Spanish Executive has done– or distribute direct aid to the most affected companies and freelancers, as the autonomous Executive did, up to a total of 1,309 million euros, of which 87 million were executed with a charge, precisely, to React-EU.
