Despite the sowing of bad omens, the president of the Budget Control Committee of the European Parliament, Monika Hohlmeier, of the European People’s Party, made public on Wednesday her diagnosis on the execution of the 31,000 million euros of European funds received by Spain: it rules out any trace of fraud or legal non-compliance on the part of the Government and thus dispels the clouds that a part of the political class and the media right had persistently spread. Already last week it was the European Commission that had given its go-ahead for Spain to access the third tranche of financing from the recovery and resilience mechanism funds. The Executive presented a compliance plan that certified a total of 121 milestones and objectives met, 29% of the total committed in the plan. The Commission’s opinion on these advances has been positive and the disbursement does not carry any associated conditions, including, therefore, the approval of the control mechanism that had been a cause for concern throughout 2022. This system, known as Coffee , is already in operation and, in the opinion of the Commission, meets the necessary requirements to issue a third disbursement which, in any case, must still be approved within the Council of the European Union.
This endorsement from the Commission came a few days before the budgetary control committee of the European Parliament landed in Spain. It had caused a certain stir due to the previous declarations of the coordinator of the group, Monika Hohlmeier, and due to the use of these declarations by the media to generate certain confusion about its role and functions. The committee is carrying out visits to all the countries of the Union, without any executive role on the management of the funds, but merely of political control. Therefore, allusions to “men in black” are malicious and wrong. This recent visit has nothing to do with the executive monitoring role exercised by the troika during the 2012 rescue.
The conclusions of the group’s work have approved the Spanish management, logically pointing out some areas for improvement, such as access to information by the media and citizens, the complementarity between the fund management system and that of the ordinary budget cycle, and a fuller participation of the autonomous communities. All of them are recommendations perfectly unrelated to the expectation generated around the alleged amendment to the entirety that awaited the Government regarding its management of Next Generation funds. There has been no correction, but neither could there have been, given the limited powers of the parliamentary committee.
