Brussels, 10 May 2023
Today’s payment of €542 million in grants was made possible by Lithuania’s fulfilment of 31 milestones linked to the first instalment. They cover key reforms in the areas of the green and digital transition, such as the adoption of legal acts to promote the production, transmission and use of electricity from renewable sources and the setting up of a Competence Centre for Digital Transformation and Open Data, to facilitate the digitalisation of public services. Lithuania has also put forward reforms to its general and vocational education system, measures in support of innovation and science, social protection and employment, as well as a digital data-storage for monitoring the implementation of the RRF, amongst others.
As for all Member States, payments under the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF), the key instrument at the heart of NextGenerationEU, are performance-based and depend on the implementation by Lithuania of the investments and reforms described in its recovery and resilience plan.
On 30 November 2022, Lithuania submitted to the Commission a first request for payment of €565 million under the RRF, covering 33 milestones. On 28 February 2023, the Commission adopted a partially positive preliminary assessment of Lithuania’s request for payment, having found that two milestones related to taxation had not been satisfactorily fulfilled. The Commission acknowledged the first steps already taken by Lithuania to fulfil these outstanding milestones, though important work remains to be done. The steps to be taken under the ‘payment suspension’ procedure, which is foreseen by the RRF Regulation to give Member States additional time to fulfil outstanding milestones, are explained in this Q&A document.
The opinion of the Economic and Financial Committee on the payment request has paved the way for the Commission to adopt a decision on the disbursement of the funds linked to the 31 milestones that have been assessed as satisfactorily fulfilled.
The overall recovery and resilience plan of Lithuania will be financed by more than €2 billion in grants. The amounts of payments made to Member States are published on the Recovery and Resilience Scoreboard, which shows the progress made in the implementation of the RRF as a whole and of the individual recovery and resilience plans. Lithuania already received a pre-financing payment of €289 million in August 2021.
More information on the RRF payment claim process can be found in this Q&A document. More information on the Recovery and Resilience Plan of Lithuania can be found here.
Source – EU Commission