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In recent days we have spoken again about the so-called Recovery Fund, the EU’s main tool to balance the economic crisis caused by the coronavirus pandemic. The Italian government is currently developing the structure that must manage the approximately 209,000 million euros that will arrive in the coming years in the form of loans and grants. On Thursday night, Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte said that a Council of Ministers will be convened to definitively approve the structure “in the next few days, probably Monday.”
The structure should be established with an amendment to the budget law that gives it special powers, but the government seems to have made some firm points.
Currently the government’s attention is focused on the drafting of the National Recovery and Resilience Plan, which is the plan that will contain the approximately 100 projects that will be financed with money from the Recovery Fund. The projects will be divided into six categories that should correspond to the six main “missions” identified in September by the Italian government (PDF), and already shared with the European Commission: digitalization, innovation and competitiveness of the productive system, ecological transition, infrastructure and mobility, education and training, social, gender and territorial equity, and health.
At the moment the work of skimming of the projects that will be included in the Plan is in progress. It is carried out by the Minister of European Affairs Enzo Amendola, who coordinates the CIAE (Interministerial Committee for European Affairs), formally chaired by Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte. The CIAE’s work is in turn supported by a technical committee followed even more directly by Amendola and that includes representatives of the regions and provinces and technical officials from the main ministries involved. The work of the technical committee serves above all to give indications on which projects to include and for what reasons, and to inform local authorities of the priorities that the government receives from the European Union.
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The CIAE has long ago arrived at a draft of the Plan, which has not yet been reviewed by Palazzo Chigi: it will then be approved in Parliament, hopefully during the Christmas holidays, say government sources, where it will be presented and submitted to vote. although the government was not obliged to do so. Only after approval in Parliament will the government send it to the European Commission: the window to do so will be open from January to April 2021.
Once the plan is approved by the European Commission and the first funds arrive, indicatively in the spring of 2021, the management will move to the new structure that will be defined in these days.
The government has defined it as the “control room”, because the Prime Minister, the Minister of Economy Roberto Gualtieri of the Democratic Party and the Minister of Economic Development, Stefano Patuanelli, of the 5 Star Movement will participate. They will be joined by six managers for each of the project’s macro-categories, who in turn will have to supervise a few dozen unspecified “technicians.”
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In the last days there were about 300 technicians, and in the last days the Sole 24 Mineral He said that behind the M5S pressures they went to 90 (it seems that the pressures also came from Italia Viva and a part of the Democratic Party). In reality, the figure has not yet been defined by the government. Minister Amendola, for her part, will be in charge of mediating between the government and the European Commission; also because the Department of European Affairs does not have the resources or the technical structure to manage large amounts of public money.
The fear of some including MEP and Action Secretary Carlo Calenda – is that the new structure can overlap with existing ministries, rather than simplify the project implementation process. At the moment, among other things, it is not clear whether the other European countries will also have similar structures: the Financial times for example, it hypothesizes that the Spanish government will absorb the money from the national budget, leaving it in the hands of the ministries responsible for individual projects.
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