Calviño sees normal that Brussels "look very carefully" to Spain for the volume of funds and for its leadership

20 Feb. () –

The First Vice President of the Government and Minister for Economic Affairs and Digital Transformation, Nadia Calviño, stated this Monday that she is facing the visit that a delegation from the commission will carry out from Monday until Wednesday with an “absolutely constructive” attitude of Budgetary Control of the European Parliament to examine how European funds for recovery, the so-called ‘Next Generation EU’, are being used.

Calviño, in statements to TVE collected by Europa Press, has considered “normal” that Brussels “looks very carefully” at Spain because it is one of the countries with the greatest endowment of European funds and because “it is one of the first”.

“We are being the guinea pigs. Everything that is put to the test in Spain later applies to the rest of the countries. And that means that we receive this mission from the European Parliament and that the Commission has been particularly demanding with all control issues. But it is our interest that these funds are used to the maximum”, stressed the first vice president.

Calviño has defended that Spain has based its Recovery Plan “on dialogue, transparency and joint work” with the European institutions “almost daily” and has insisted that the Spanish Government “has every interest” in doing so an “objective and technical” analysis by the European Commission of the use of funds, because Spain “is doing it well”.

In this sense, he stated that 31,000 million euros have already been received and recalled that last Friday the procedure was launched to receive another 6,000 million euros in the next two months. “What he shows is that Spain is meeting the milestones and that it is doing it well,” said Calviño.

The vice-president, who explained that this afternoon she will meet with the European delegation because tomorrow she is traveling to India to attend the G20 Summit, pointed out that, in order to carry out her analysis, Spain “has insisted a lot” that the European delegation visit projects that are already underway so that they can see where the European funds are going.

Thus, for Calviño, this visit must be an opportunity for Brussels to “see on the ground” all the information that Spain has been passing on to it on the use of funds.

“It is true that the significant participation of Spanish MEPs from PP and Vox (in the delegation) has attracted a bit of attention, but our interest is to have a visit that is as objective and technical as possible,” Calviño insisted, stressing that, On the part of the Spanish Government, transparency is “maximum”.

The vice-president has assured that she has had a relationship with the president of the Euro-parliamentary commission, Monika Hohlmeier, “for many years” and knows the Commission’s Budgetary Control Committee well. “That is why we have made ourselves available to them and have given them all the information (…) We have a shared interest in ensuring that European funds are used well and we are doing it”, she remarked.

Calviño has also indicated that, without these resources associated with the Recovery Plan, “it would not be understood” that the Spanish economy had registered two consecutive years of GDP growth of 5.5%. “It has a very significant impact on growth and modernization of the economy,” he highlighted.