Government approves OUG on elaboration of National Recovery and Resilience Plan

The Government approved, on Wednesday, by emergency ordinance, the amendment and completion of OUG no. 155/2020 regarding some measures for the elaboration of the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR) necessary for Romania to access reimbursable and non-reimbursable external funds within the Recovery and Resilience Facility. The substantiation note of the normative act states that "the term 'relaunch' needs to be replaced with 'recovery' in the title of the National Recovery and Resilience Plan, in order to correlate it with (the EU) Regulation 2021/241 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 12 February 2021 establishing the Recovery and Resilience Facility". "Moreover, the structure of the plan needs to be modified by establishing six investment pillars, in order to correlate with the same regulation, with the repeal, by consequence, of the regulations regarding projects and areas of intervention. Given the urgency in the finalizing and assumption, at national level, of the National Recovery and Resilience Plan and taking into account the very short period of time until the deadline, it is necessary to mandate the Ministry of European Investments and Projects to conduct the negotiation procedures with the European Commission, in order to approve the PNRR," reads the substantiation note. Considering that the implementation period of the National Recovery and Resilience Plan is relatively short, the investment projects need "the Ministry of Investments and European Projects to make the approval facility more flexible by eliminating the 10-day deadline, as well as by introducing within this facility the coordinating ministries for reforms", the same document further mentions. Prime Minister Florin Citu had declared, after the government meeting on March 19, when discussing the first reading of the OUG on the National Recovery and Resilience Plan, that PNRR will allocate "important resources for road and railway infrastructure, but also for motorways". "Certainly, the gas network also. We want to build new hospitals, we mention that very clearly in this program. And, of course, social measures. We thus give importance to all priorities. A reform that Romania needed," the prime minister had said at the end of the government meeting on March 19. In the same context, Deputy Prime Minister Dan Barna explained that PNRR has "six pillars, (...) six main axes, on which are allocated almost 30 billion euros available for Romania at European level".AGERPRES(RO- author : Daniel Florea, editor: Florin Marin; EN - author: Simona Iacob, editor: Maria Voican)