Th. Skylakakis: At €5 billion, investments from Development Fund loans until the end of the year

By Tasos Dasopoulos

The estimate that the investments that will be in the starting line until the end of the year and will be strengthened by the loans of the Recovery Fund will double was made by the Economist conference by the Deputy Minister of Finance, Theodoros Skylakakis.

In a panel, in which the course of the Recovery Fund was examined, the Deputy Minister of Finance said that so far the investments that have been submitted and received pre-approval from the banks have reached 2.5 billion euros. “I believe that this amount will be doubled by the end of the year”, emphasized Mr. Skylakakis. He also added that the implementation of the entire program is progressing according to the schedule and that Greece will apply for the second installment of the program which amounts to 1.97 billion euros.

At the present stage, as the minister said, the review of the program has begun which is imposed by the reduction of available resources for Greece by 400 million euros (due to the high growth it had in 2021) but also the increase in costs brought by the budget and imposes a corresponding adaptation of the projects. “The important thing is that the reforms of the program are non-revisable. We are committed to implement them and we will do it” said Mr. Skylakakis who included in the overall review of the Greek program and its new branch REPowerEU which will proceed as soon as the Commission finalize and publicize the regulation of the program in the next period.

In the ongoing issue of public administration performance raised by those present, Mr. Skylakakis admitted that in the past there were problems and spoke about the bonus system that has been launched for public servants who deal with resource management in order to increase their efficiency .