EU countries urged to speed up ratifications for virus rescue

BRUSSELS – European Union head Ursula von der Leyen today urged member states to accelerate ratification of a key part of the bloc’s €750 billion (RM3.67 trillion) plan to recover from the impact of the coronavirus.

“This should be our common aim: by mid-year, we should be able to (disburse) the first funds,” she told a media conference after the European Council of member states and the European Parliament gave their signatures to the mechanism conceived in a July summit.

The overall scheme, called “New Generation EU”, consists mainly of a €672.5 billion “recovery and resilience facility” that relies on an unprecedented pooling of debt to provide grants and loans to EU countries.

The money has to go to priorities backed by the EU, particularly with an emphasis on making economies “greener”. Other priorities include boosting digital transformation, social cohesion and better health care.

To allow the commission to borrow from financial markets, member states have to ratify an “own resources decision” allowing their contributions to go towards the pooled instrument. Only six of the 27 EU countries have so far ratified it.

“It’s in the interest of the member states themselves to speed up this process as much as possible,” von der Leyen said.

Portuguese Prime Minister Antonio Costa, present alongside her because his country holds the rotating EU presidency, called the recovery and resilience facility “a vitamin to boost economic recovery”.

He said the other path to Europe bouncing back was Covid-19 vaccinations, which he said had to be sped up.

Von der Leyen, criticised in recent weeks for the slow pace of jabs in the EU and a shortfall in promised vaccines, said the main “bottleneck” was “the capacities to manufacture at scale”.

Nevertheless, she said, the commission was holding to its goal of seeing 70% of adults in the EU inoculated by “the end of the summer”. 

By that she specified that she meant by September 21, not the end date of August originally advanced last month by her vice-president, Margaritis Schinas. – AFP, February 12, 2021