 Friends, colleagues, good morning. Good morning, everyone, and welcome on behalf of the group of the European People's Party in the European Parliament to this event in which we want to talk about the role which European funds have for the development of member states. We have come as an EPP group to Croatia today because in recent years, Croatia has become a model for good governance at European level. I would like to thank personally Prime Minister Andrei Plenkovich, the colleagues from HDZ, European Commissioner Dubrovka Suica from Croatia, the members of the European Parliament from HDZ who are all here with us, Karlo Restler, Shuncan Aglava, Grzeljana Zhovko, and Tomislav Sokol for really putting Croatia at the heart of all decisions which are made at the European level. Croatia is today stronger, more influential, more trustworthy at European level because of the work done by Prime Minister, by Commission, or by members of the European Parliament. And the fact that Croatia is today so credible and so trustworthy at the European level gives capacity to the Croatian government to obtain at European level things for the people of Croatia. For the last years, the European Union is making available more funds than ever to member states to develop countries, to overcome difficulties, to help people, to help enterprises, to help mayors, local, regional, elected authorities to overcome difficulties, to modernize, and to make sure that for the future, the economy is stronger and in a better position to face any adversity and a difficulty. Immediately after the start of COVID, the European Union made available the biggest package of economic support ever created. Next generation EU, the recovery and resilience facility, more than 700 billion euros for Europe as a whole, more than 5,000 billion euros in grants for Croatia, for the people of Croatia. We have come today here to Zagreb to talk about how this money is being spent, how it is being put at work for the benefit of the people. Transparency is also something very important for the EPP group, for HDZ, for Croatian government. We want to make sure that these money is being spent on priorities of the people, that people know where this money is being spent and this is exactly why we are working together with mayors, with local and regional elected officials. Because EU, the mayors, know best what are the priorities of the people in local communities who was hit by the pandemic, who needs support to struggle with their energy bills and this is why the voice of mayors need to be heard. The EPP is the party of mayors at European level, HDZ is the party of mayors, of regional leaders here in Croatia and this is why we are doing this together with local regional elected leaders today and I would particularly like to also welcome the colleagues who have come from the Committee of Regents from Brussels, under the leadership of Olga Giebliewicz, the president of the EPP group in the Committee of Regents and the Marshal of the West Pomerania region in Poland. So we are going to discuss today how we are making best use of this money because next generation EU is a unique instrument, it was created after a unique crisis, it happens once, so we have to make sure that we use it well and we develop the economy. As an EPP group, we have started this series of events, road to recovery, we were in Poland, we were in Portugal, we are now in Croatia and I can say we clearly see the difference between Poland, which is a country where the government is at odds with the European Commission because of rule of law and money is not flowing. Portugal, where they have a plan, it's being implemented but they lack vision and Croatia, which is doing much better. We see a vision in the Croatian plan, we see a plan to modernize the country, to modernize education, we see reforms which will modernize education, it will give a higher chance for young people in Croatia to be well educated, well skilled to find a job. It will be an important contribution to the demographic challenges which we were all facing in central Eastern Europe. We see with the Croatian plan a plan which will modernize hospitals, make sure that hospitals will be modern, will be enlarged, will be modernized and we also see a vision to develop the economy, to invest in innovative companies, to make sure that the economy will be more digital, greener, cleaner, to make sure that buildings will be renovated in a way in which they will be more energy efficient and more solid in the face of eventual earthquakes. So we see a plan serving the people, bringing the country forward and this is the difference between a country well led by an EPP government, an EPP prime minister and other countries that we were in. So today will be an occasion to discuss about how these amounts are already being absorbed and what the plan forward is. Up to now, I can say and I will conclude with this, Croatia is amongst the EU member states which is performing best when it comes to the absorption of next generation EU. Croatia and only four other member states out of a total of 27 have received the refinancing from the European Union, have received the first trash, Prime Minister Plankovic sent the payment request to the commission, the commission concluded that everything was fully respected, first trash was paid and the second trash as well. Only Croatia and four member states have received two trashes. Everyone else is lagging behind. So on this note, congratulations Prime Minister, congratulations dear colleagues because we know it was an effort made together by government, by members of parliament, by mayors, prefects and representatives of the regions. We are discussing about this today, we're happy to be here. Once again, thank you very much colleagues from HDZ, Prime Minister, government for hosting us and thank you to colleagues who came from Brussels from other member states, Jan Orbitz Vice President of the group from Poland, Olga Geblewicz to show the trust and the support in our Croatian authorities. On this note, I thank you all, I wish us good discussions and I will now give the floor for three interventions to Zzeli Koturk, the chairman of the Association of Cities, Carlo Ressler, our colleague from the European Parliament and Dubravka Šurica, the distinguished European commissioner from Croatia. Thank you all for joining us this morning, let's have good discussions and let's show the people what we did well so far and what we will do well for Croatia in the upcoming years. Thank you very much. Good morning and welcome. Welcome to Zagreb. I will continue in creation, dear friends from the political group of European People's Party from HDZ, welcome to Zagreb. It is my honor that I can as the mayor of the city of Zaprasic and the chairman of the Association of Cities which has 127 members to welcome you here. Welcome to our Prime Minister, Mr. Plenkovic, Mrs. Šu, it's a vice president of the European Commission. Among us, we also have the vice chairman of the EPP group, chairman of the Working Group for Budget Instructor Policies from our Committee of Regents that I belong to and also would like to welcome all other mayors and heads of regional bodies who are present here today. Dear ladies and gentlemen, it is clear that we are among a very sensitive political moment. So recovery and resilience is something that is quite important to all of us. It is clear that consequences of the COVID crisis but also new challenges in the world from Ukraine and unfortunately here in Croatia, the consequences of the earthquakes that we experience, all these put new challenges in front of us. So I would like to say thank you because I heard that Croatia is among the countries who have made a lot of progress on all these issues. Mrs. Šu, it often says, talks about dialogue with citizens about our future and especially now that in front of us, we have measures that we need to implement related to our cities and regions but also to the rest of Europe. Is there any better communication than the communication between regions, counties and cities? If we say that one third of European public money is spent through local self-government, if 56 of public investments is linked to local self-government units, then these sentences are enough. So dear ladies and gentlemen, I would like to say thank you once again for coming here today in Zagreb. We are sorry that we don't have all our colleagues here because of adverse weather conditions that prevented them from coming from Dalmatia to Zagreb but I hope that this conference today will result in excellent results that we will be as citizens of this wonderful city. We will be more than satisfied with and I hope that you will take home only nice memories. So once again, good luck and I wish you a productive and good conference. Thank you. Dear Siegfried, dear Jan, dear President of the Group of the European People's Party in the Committee of Region, postman and president of the government. Dear Prime Minister, dear Ministers, dear Vice President of the Commission, dear Mayors, dear Prefects from all areas of Croatia, dear Members of Parliament, members of the Croatian Audit Court, dear guests, dear friends, it is my pleasure to welcome you here today in Zagreb at this third conference organized by our political family on the Recovery and Resilience Facility, the key element of modernization, strengthening of Croatia, as well as all of Europe. In 2019, when our mandate started, when the institutional cycle of the EU started, it was impossible to foresee the health crisis, economic crisis caused by the pandemic, but also the intensity and the speed of technological, economic, climate, social changes in the entire Europe, which directly impact on all our societies. In the past several years, we were faced with unprecedented historical changes. First of all, the pandemic that revealed all our vulnerabilities. And then we also faced the brutal Russian aggression against Ukraine, which made Europe aware that taking the environment of peace as granted is not something that can be done as such anymore. Many external actors, unfortunately some domestic ones as well, forecasted the end of the European project and European Union. Quite the contrary happened, despite all anti-European tones and all the ones who tried to gain a political profit in a cheap way and to bring into question the European Union, European policy in real time managed and has managed to fight against such sentiments. Despite the apocalyptic scenarios that were forecasted by the left and right-wing populists, Europe has decided and Europe helps without calculations, abundantly and invests in all parts of the European territory, but having in mind that development and especially the time of crisis is the only right response. The best example of this is probably this recovery and resilience facility as part of a broader record investment package. What does this mean for Croatia? When it comes to Croatia, this is a unique historical first-class generational opportunity for strengthening modernization at all levels of governance and in all areas of life. With 5.5 billion euros of grants and now with also very favorable loans that will enable financing of additional projects, among the member states, Croatia is one of the pioneers by the level of the funds allocated also per capita but also according to its GDP but also in terms of implementation of the National Plan of Recovery and Resilience. For our political opponents, they say this is some sort of automatism but for the ones who have intellectual goodwill, understand that this has not happened on its own and they are aware that everything is thanks to the government of Prime Minister Andre Plenkovich. Nobody is more aware of the needs of local communities than mayors, prefects and therefore they are a key stakeholder of the government in the implementation of direct investments where they bring the major benefit for the entire society. Investment in science, education and innovation, infrastructure, entrepreneurs, green digital investments change our economy, change our local communities and change them for the best. With record investments at our disposal and empowered by the entrance to Schengen area and Euro area, Croatia is becoming more and more stronger and more resilient. Dear friends, the idea of this policy is for it to be speedy in its delivery but also in its effects to be long-standing and strategically thought out. Therefore, our strategic vision, our National Plan of Recovery and Resilience is focused on the future, on strengthening Croatia and Europe in the face of all geopolitical turbulences and now additionally through E-Power EU in terms of strengthening energy independence. Let us think digital, let us think green but we also have in mind demography and we need to add value to the world of 2030 and 2050 and not of 2020 or in the year 2000. With the successful implementation and use of funds that we have at our disposal, we are disarming all of those criticizing Europe, criticizing European administration by saying that it is hermeneutic, that it has no other purpose and that it only happens in some long Brussels hallways or some people here say that Croatia loses more than it gains and they are also comparing advantages and disadvantages and what we are investing in Europe and they say that this is not clear. However, the benefits of this policy are not something abstract. Quite the contrary, they are specific, they are pulpable, they are visible and life in Croatia is due to this more secure and pleasant. The idea of today's conference is to discuss with you with our prefects and mayors together with colleagues from European level to discuss of all the challenges and also to present everything that we managed to achieve so far. Therefore, I would like to thank you on my own behalf, especially the ones who are going to present all the successes from their local environments. As Sigurd already said, this is an excellent example of the implementation of recovery facility and the colleague Sigurd Muresan, who is the vice chair of the EPP Group. I would like to thank for this valuable initiative that will also take place in other parts of Europe. Thank you all for coming, thank you all for your time and I wish you a successful conference. Thank you. Good morning, everyone, dear Prime Minister, dear Jan, dear Siegfried, dear Olgerd, dear representatives from the European Parliament, dear ministers, Mr. Piletician, Mr. Filipowicz, dear prefects, dear mayors, dear ladies and gentlemen, dear Minister Brnac, it is my great pleasure to be a part of this conference today, organized by the European People's Party, to see how successful Croatia is in realizing this recovery and resilience facility. I was in Croatia when I had the opportunity to bring these two tranches that Siegfried mentioned, 700 million euros each. I think this is a great success for Croatia, but European Commission who decided to make this move, as we know, recovery and resilience facility is a response to the pandemic that we experienced. We wanted to strengthen and make the EU and 27 member countries more resilient. At that moment, we didn't know that we would also experience brutal aggression by Russia on Ukraine. I would just like to say I will make a small digression. This is a total of 67 billion euros that EU has invested in Ukraine for economic aid, for military aid, which is 12 billion euros. So this is all done in parallel with this facility. As you can see, US invested over 50 billion euros, and we invested even more. There are a lot of other data, but I will finish my digression. My apologies to Minister of Foreign Affairs for not greeting him at the beginning, and Ivan from Luxembourg, from European Audits Court. As you know, in regards to this facility, this facility has been a great success. Of course, this does not mean that we should not follow the rules regarding different mechanisms of the EU, but these were a bit more flexible rules because we wanted for the mayors, prefects and others to be able to use these funds in the best possible manner. Of course, some procedures were slowed down by the public tenders, but still we managed to do the work. For the first time in history, EU is in debt on financial market and capital market to ensure these funds before member states did that by themselves, but this, for the first time, was done by the European Union itself, as we've heard from Carlo before. We are in debt as a union for the first time in history, and this was the result of joint agreement from all the leaders in the EU. Through this facility, we cover two key areas, recovery as a direct response to the pandemic, and also we want to prepare for future challenges, so we want to become more resilient. As we've heard, Croatia has been quite successful in using these funds compared to the size of our economy. Croatia is one of member states that will receive the majority of funds from this facility and grants are 9% of our GDP. As we've heard from Zikrit, we are a third member state out of all 27 who has requested the second tranche from this facility. We fulfilled all the criteria, and since last year, we received 2.2 billion euros, which is more than 40% of the total 5.5 billion, which is meant for Croatia from this facility. We have established a strong structure. We have an audit and control system in place, and this was all done before making the first payment request. So we have different bodies for prevention of corruption, fraud, and so on. It is also important to continue with implementing the projects. This event today is another contribution to these efforts. I am certain that our Croatian counties, cities, and local communities will continue being successful as they have been so far. And we focused on territorial and local dimension. Considering I am the Vice President for European Commission for Democracy and Democracy, it is also important to mention the effects on demography and aging population that we have here. But not only in Croatia, this phenomenon is present in all member states. So I'm happy that in our plan, we have significant funds for encouraging positive demographic trends. When we talk about transition, we have digital and green transitions. But third transition is demographic transition that maybe we are not aware of sufficiently. But we need to take it into account and we need to invest funds into it. Results will not come overnight, but they will come. Of course, we also have reform of the educational system. Here in Croatia, we want to build and reconstruct kindergartens, elementary schools. Also, if we are not active in other areas, buildings will not be enough. Kindergarten will not be enough. When we talk about demography, we have a number of policies. We don't have one measure. We have several of them. They're all common measures on local, state, and European levels. And we need to make effort, otherwise we will not succeed. We need to invest in infrastructure, as we know, for transportation, railroads, roads. We put aside 700 million euros. We want to increase competitiveness of Croatia. We also used funds, and we need to use them together with cohesion, structural funds. We said that cohesion and structural funds have some conditions and requirements that are a bit stricter, but we still need to fulfill them. But we need to use all these funds. We also need to use the possibility of so-called talent booster mechanism. We want to track talent. This is initiative of European Commission. And this initiative is focused on increasing competitiveness of regions which are faced with dual challenges, people leaving and reducing the number of highly educated or high educated people. So we need to use all the possibilities within these booster mechanism. Today we are also remembering our success so far. But we need to continue our work to ensure our future. And if some new crisis appears, we need to be ready. We need to strengthen our society, our democracy, especially nowadays. As you know, European Commission has stated that new mechanisms for defending our democracy will be in place by May this year, because democracy is something that needs to be strengthened. We need to be ready against hybrid threats and other types of threats to defend our democracy. We are working on defending our democracy from within. We need to educate our young people in kindergarten, in schools for them to know what is fake news, what is hybrid threat. And so these are all long-term measures. And I hope we will be successful in those measures. And of course, we've seen from Russian aggression to Ukraine that we are not in business as usual situation anymore. So European Commission is making a lot of effort to fight against these threats. We will soon be receiving the third tranche, and I hope we will continue being successful. Thank you. Colleagues, and now it is our privilege to welcome this morning with us the Prime Minister of Croatia, President of HTZ Andrei Plenkovich. It is our privilege to welcome him this morning. And it is also a privilege for Croatia and for the people of Croatia to be led by Andrei Plenkovich these years. We are seeing that Europe makes important decisions these years, and we are all seeing how important it is that Croatia is being led in a credible and in a strong way at European level. Croatia is today a member of the Schengen area. Croatia is today a member of the Euro area. Croatia is part of all decisions which are being made at European level. The voice of Croatia is stronger and clearer than ever. Thanks to the efforts of all of you under the leadership of the Prime Minister, it's a privilege to have you with us today. Prime Minister, the floor is yours. Good afternoon. I welcome you all. Dear Siegfried, thank you for this introduction and for coming to you as a member of the presidency of the European People's Party and the European Parliament, dear Jan Albrecht. I'm happy to see you here as one of the most experienced members of parliament that you are here with us today. And I would like to thank our Albrecht Geldović, president of European People's Party Club at the Committee of the Regents, who is also here so that he could at this conference with all the key stakeholders of HDZ and members of the government. I welcome them as well. Vice president of the European Commission, judge at the court of auditors are four MPs of the European Parliament, dear pre-effects and mayors. I'm happy to see you all here to discuss important instruments for the development of Croatia. And for amendment of the financing instrument. This is seven year multi-annual budgetary framework. I'm especially happy that today's conference can be used to remind ourselves and the Croatian government on the power and strength of the European People's Party and HDZ when we talk about Croatia, especially when it comes to local government units. The local elections, I want to remind our colleagues who might not be aware of this, with partners, won 75% of counties. We have 15 out of 20, which is the best result ever that we managed to achieve in the elections in 2020. HDZ has the trust of people in 45% of cities and 45% of municipalities. Of course, this is the seventh year of our second mandate in a row, along with our political partners at the national level. These are representatives of liberal parties, pensioners and national minorities. We have a stable parliamentary majority that ensure the main precondition for political stability. I keep repeating this in public so that the majority of actors in Croatia, especially our critics and from the part of media public could understand the distinction between political stability and stagnation because there's a huge difference. Political stability that we have brings economic and social prosperity and development and stagnation would mean that we are lagging behind those who are more developed than us. And due to this key precondition, this is not the case, but we are experiencing development. And as Sigurd said, Croatia is one of the countries that became member of the Schengen area, Eurozone, NATO and so on. And I will keep repeating all this because this is something that needs to be repeated and people need to become aware of this, regardless of everything that has been going on in the media. Of course, we are not among the 15 most developed countries because we would be among G20 if we were, but we are members of these other groups and now we are part of the Schengen and Eurozone and we managed to become part of this group thanks to our planned strategies. When we started thinking about introducing Euro 2017, thanks to our great efforts, thanks to Action Plan to meet all the criteria and entering the Eurozone at the moment of the major tectonic crisis happening in the world. This was a financial, economic, social crisis and we managed to meet all these conditions when the creation credit rating according to all three agencies was at the good position. So this is progress, this is not stagnation. So at the time of previous crisis, that is still ongoing, COVID-19 pandemic, we reminded ourselves how this next generation instrument came to be and I will continue to what Dubrovka said. Croatia took presidency over you in January 2020. For the first time in its history, Commission started two months prior to this and pandemic hit and this limited our activities at that time. We did have some meetings in Croatia in early March but after that we didn't have any physical meetings in person anymore and the economy is shut down, transport, education, our way of life changed. There was a decline in GDP in the majority of the EU member states and in Croatia this was minus 7.4% in 2020 according to statistical data but at the time together with the Commission and other stakeholders, we tried to tackle this huge issue. This was unprecedented issue because this was a COVID crisis and so this huge issue and required big solution. We know what COVID was, we know what the consequences were and the solution is why we are here today. This is next generation EU instrument. The first such effort of finding funds, allocation of these funds, grants, very favorable loans in the way to enable all member states to recover as soon as possible from the crisis that happened at the time. Of course this happened completely independently of our wishes and efforts. This was an external factor before that under our governance from 16 to 19, Croatia was in microeconomic imbalances, we had budgetary deficits, we were two levels below the credit rating that we have now but we initiated responsible governance of public finance, we reduced public debt and we found ourselves in a situation where our economic health and social situation was very fit and that's how that was our state of affairs when COVID hit. So resilience and strength of Croatia in its economic recovery is very important. So we had minus 7.4% in 2020 and in 2021 we experienced a growth of 13.4%. This has proved the strength and resilience of Croatian economy, Croatian workers, Croatian entrepreneurs but we combined the measures of Croatian interventionism that were unprecedented. They were targeted and they enabled Croatia not to completely fall apart but to maintain social cohesion. There were no huge lay-off waves. The companies did not go bankrupt. Croatian families were not, their existence was not jeopardized and we invested a lot of effort from the government for all this to happen. We enabled 800,000 workers in private sector. I'm not talking about state administration. We enabled these people to receive their wages. 100,000 companies did not go bankrupt thanks to our efforts because we enabled tax reliefs, we enabled them loans, very favorable loans without interest rates and so on. So this is all thanks to the government. I'm talking about COVID and in line with this along with our partners, remember there were elections in 2020. On the 10th of July we became part of the banking union. We formed a new coalition around the 20th or 21st or 2nd of July and in parallel EU next generation was developed which brought to Croatia as you could see around 15 billion euros of this new multi-annual financial framework and this was not a regular allocation. We fought at several levels. We advocated cohesion, regional development, agriculture, more for investment so there's no segment that was not in the government's focus where we wanted to invest as many funds as possible for the development and in relation to per capita only Greece received more funds than Croatia. Croatia in the first phase received 6.3 billion grants, 3.6 billion of very favorable loans. The fact is that there was such a huge economic jump in 2021 and according to the last assessments of the European Commission that we are going to have an economic growth of 6.3% and that we will be among four member states with the highest economic growth and I'm talking about the period of Russian aggression against Ukraine and all the crisis energy, food crisis and all other pressures so all this speaks in favor of Croatian development that even the regulation on EU next generation reduced part of funds for Croatia because they saw that Croatia is recovering very quickly so from 6.3 to 5.5 billion which is still a huge amount of money. So since autumn 2020 I have personally coordinated all ministerial meetings and we have been preparing the national plan of recovery and resilience we divided into five pillars and one horizontal initiative and we allocated funds for environmental protection for economy, for health care, for social welfare for judiciary and governance for energy efficiency, civil engineering, recovery after the earthquake and all these areas are of key importance for Croatia and they're all part of this financing through multi-annual financial framework. Not only we developed a plan, we presented and consulted on it with the European Commission we received a positive note from the Commission, positive assessment we hosted at the time the President of the European Commission we signed an agreement with her we created a framework that lives in parallel with this multi-annual financial framework with this seven year budget and the programs that are being implemented through partnership agreement with the Commission of Ferreira and here with the Ministry of Finances we developed another framework where we very quickly made the criteria that we defined jointly actually with the European Commission and one of these projects and reforms there also there's this principle do not do significant harm this is an important criteria in developing these projects and we focused on two global topics, digitalization and green transition they're here and they permeate all the projects that Croatia is implementing within the National Plan for Recovery and Resilience and we showed additional quality that we didn't have before along with Italy and Spain we are most efficient in meeting the criteria and in tenders, in launching tenders we already received 2.2 billion euros out of this 5.5 billion so 40% we still continue to implement reforms usually in March or in April we send our report to the Commission they analyze it and then in June they approve it so every six months they allocate the funds this means that we are very wise in planning the criteria and that we are meeting them, we are receiving funds and tenders are launched and we are using these funds and the purpose of this next generation was to find a solution to the major problem in a quicker way than it was the case before therefore it seems to me that this experience of Croatia as the youngest EU member the use of funds from the National Plan for Recovery and Resilience and next generation EU is a new experience, is an added value to our abilities at all levels I keep saying that we will be able to see the benefits of EU membership in 2030 after we go through these two financial perspectives after we use next EU generation instrument then we can reflect on Croatia before 2013 and what happened after 7 years and then we will be able to see that Croatian membership in the EU this was not something that happened by chance this happened thanks to the work and efforts of political parties we have people who understand what the EU is, what the European project is we have people who had to negotiate on this membership we have people who had to advocate for this membership we have to have in mind that these others must not forget that HDZ government concluded these agreements HDZ signed the accession agreement this must be remembered even the referendum was implemented the entire campaign and it brought 66.33 I am talking about this due to political topic this is the issue of identification with European topics and strategic processes the difference between HDZ and opponents especially new opponents the members created in the past 10 years that did not exist before the element of identification completely divides us into those who contributed to the strategic development of Croatia and the ones who did not contribute at all in terms of work they played no role they did not participate in negotiations they never did anything they didn't even write a note to some other club or European institution so when they go to European Parliament by mistake or accidentally they do not represent anybody and they never vote for anything significant for Croatia or Europe so you have opposition, SDP, eternal opposition and things happen by default there they wanted to see how to maybe in some shady ways make Croatia miss this Schengen opportunity is that correct? the four of you need to talk about this this is a very important detail therefore this difference is huge HDZ as a pro-European party a party of the right centre the most powerful party in the European Parliament responsible for the future of Croatia makes strategic steps forward nothing happened by chance new workplaces, new jobs did not happen by chance new companies did not develop by chance and in 2020 unlike other EU countries there were zero demonstrations in Croatia why? because we regulated the energy market oil derivatives we reduced the rate of VAT despite all these negative external effects that made life harder for our citizens the government stood by its citizens like no time before with unprecedented action and therefore we combined national policies we used mechanisms at our disposal at the level of the EU and we did our best to make this situation easier for our citizens and the price of gas thanks to the agreement in the political council ministers in charge of energy market leads to decrease of pricing gas and this will lead to prices of gas being lower than they were supposed to be therefore it is important that you as members of the party be aware of the unit that we are representing sometimes this is represented in a project of agglomeration or construction of kindergartens or construction of schools for one shift teaching or strengthening judiciary system or strengthening efficiency somewhere in the economy in transition of renewables and financing future hydrocarbon energy sources this is all part of our party's policy so after achieving these strategic goals let us focus on reducing inequalities in creation society this is a very important element this is cohesion, this is the core of what we do of course we don't think everyone can have the same but we want everyone to have a good life in creation therefore we want to reduce poverty in creation for 324,000 people in creation now if Commissioner Schmidt will be here with us if weather conditions allow this and we can talk to him about this what Croatia can do in terms of social policy document that Dubravka mentioned talking about talent this is actually a document that precisely defines issues at the level of the EU that we are also facing there are two trends of migration from rural to urban areas and these people stay in their country or from new EU members to older EU members due to unequal development and higher wages where market economy has been a strong industry where they can earn more this is not something that our friends from Romania or Poland or from Bulgaria or Czech Republic or Slovakia Hungary are unaware they all experience the same the same process but they accessed earlier and this process happened in their countries before then here it's an identical process but meeting the goals of national development strategy using the mechanism of next generation EU having more quality capable people who can implement projects fully in a high quality way, in a legal way in for the beneficiaries and to add value to development then we as the totality of creation politics with HDZ in power will achieve what parties are for this is the improved quality of life of citizens and improved economy and therefore it is important to have such conferences and to discuss with our partners who are present here and colleagues had a similar conference in Poland so after a similar conference in Portugal we're also in opposition we are now having this conference where EPP is in power where we can present all the achievements that we have managed to implement so far therefore our representatives from local and regional people from Dalmatia could not be here with us today because of these weather conditions but they are very active in implementing all our policies and I think with joint efforts and all of you at your levels are working in the same direction I believe we will continue to achieve good results the government will continue implementing measures even after the first of April where this is needed, calibrated as we did so far timely, comprehensively and within the program of measures that we have at our disposal at European level in line with European ACI in order to maintain and develop social cohesion it is extremely important we have to maintain it at a time of crisis at all costs there is no price that the state and the country is not ready to pay in order to maintain social cohesion Euro and Schengen will bring advancement and development the creativity of creation entrepreneurs these are great preconditions in terms of continuous investment in infrastructure this will all bring progress this will bring progress in education we can all be proud that after two mandates of our government every child in primary school in Croatia has free books, free transport and free meal this trinity leads to better learning outcomes and education outcomes in all areas that have been tested this is also part of our policy this is our legacy as well and this is also not stagnation but progress, but without political stability this would not happen it would be good for Siegfried to explain later on what means when you don't have political stability in a country so some other countries did not manage to realize these goals of entering into the Eurozone entering to Schengen so it would be a bad idea for you to hear from others so everything that we did was not by accident it was by having a plan so I would like to say thank you to our colleagues especially to our colleagues from the European Parliament who in cooperation with other colleagues came here today and gave their time precious time to focus on this topic to hear and to talk about the absorption of the funds that we have available within the European multi-annual financial framework and from this facility to use this fund to make Croatia a more favorable place to live and to fulfill our goals I think we can be satisfied that we have our priorities in line with all the components and it's on the beneficiaries to use these funds in the best possible way and in the next couple of days we will have a new tender regarding elementary schools for example so thank you once again and congratulations Prime Minister, thank you very much Croatia is today a model for the whole European Union for making sure that money from the people of Europe for the people of Croatia is well spent and it is arriving where it is needed thank you once again to you and to the government to local regional authorities for making best use of this European opportunity as the Prime Minister has said in other countries there are delays there are postponements there are risks for governments losing EU funds this is not the case for Croatia here we can talk positively about what is achieved Croatia is amongst the EU countries doing best when it comes to accessing money and putting it at work here we can talk about developing the Croatian economy and serving people of Croatia together and because we said we are serving people of Croatia local and regional authorities have an important role and let me just introduce our next panel which has the title involvement of local authorities in the design and implementation of the recovery plan lessons learned by the mayor's with local regional authorities and this panel will be led and moderated by Jan Ulrich from Poland, vice president of the EPP group in the European Parliament and responsible for the seven-year multi-annual financial framework Marko Marusic the prefect of the Bielovaj-Bilogora County Antonija Jozic the prefect of Božera Slavonia County and Ivan Zagar from Slovenia from the municipality of Slovenska Bistrica they will also be joined by Ivana Maletić who gained a lot of respect while she was in the European Parliament as our colleague working on budget budgetary control and she now serves in the European Court of Auditors to make sure that money is well spent we give the floor to Jan Ulrich to moderate this panel and we thank the prime minister for joining us we wish him best of luck and success in managing all of the tasks that he has so a 2-3 minutes break for the prime minister to depart and then Jan Ulrich will start the first panel as discussed, thank you very much prime minister, thank you can we start the panel please please take your seats okay yes I'm not from Croatia you are from the Slovenska good day we are not so successful we have also nobody we don't even have the green light to start because of the judiciary because of the judiciary and because the government is fighting each other inside the government they are fighting now because they are obliged to put the judiciary forward and we need to okay ladies and gentlemen please take your seats we start the first panel and I will first I would like to ask to the stage and to the panel Madam Ivana Maletich the member of European Court of Auditors between the parliament before you can take the second okay and and prefect of Bielogura County Marko Marusic please the prefect of okay and the prefect of Pozhega Slavonia County Antonija Ozic and Mr. Ivan Zagreb is already here the mayor of Slavenska member of the EPP Committee of Regions and this panel will be about the involvement of local authorities in the design implementation recovery plan this is a very tricky question because the Ivan knows very well that the whole construction of the RRF is completely different than the cohesion policy so this is different that's why in fact the structure of RRF doesn't require the consultation with local government this is the specificity of the RRF so in some of the member states the local and regional governments are completely not involved at all in the RRF in some of the member states they are involved in the consultation but also in implementation of the program so what makes the difference that's why we know very well the success of RRF depends on the real involvement if the local and regional government are not involved this is a risk that at the end will not be the success so the question for you here during this debate is what about the involvement of local and regional authorities I mean municipalities and counties in Croatia and how it's seen by someone from Croatia who is in the European institution in the court of auditors so the highest control Ivana is one of the highest controller in the European structures so I think this is very interesting because we see the success in Croatia it's very clear and the question is to what extent this success is based on local and regional authorities it's very interesting for me I am this kind of politician I used to be the mayor and president of the region so I know how important it is that the local government is involved so first let's start with a member of European court of auditors Ivana will make the speech and next we will have the reactions we can say the comments from the local authorities from two member states from Croatia and from Slovakia sorry you see the Slovenia yes because this is Slovenska member of European Court Committee of Regions sorry someone from Poland should know but anyway Ivana the story is yours thank you very much Jan and thank you for this excellent initiative I wrote to recovery all over the Europe going with this big challenge for all of you who are organizing this exactly because what you explained we have such a huge differences among the member states but now I will of course continue in Croatian the words hello everyone dear representatives in the Croatian Parliament dear prefects mayors heads of local government self-government units all the stakeholders in the recovery resilience plan I will be talking about including all stakeholders not only in the implementation process of this plan but in the adoption process of this plan I will give you some slides which will confirm what Jan mentioned in his introduction how different understanding of member states in regards to this facility it was introduced within a very short period and due to this member states tried do what they could within that short period some of them managed to consult some of the stakeholders some did not manage to do so this is why we have such a diverse approach and overview within the EU this timeline that Karlo mentioned in his speech just like Vice President Mrs. Šujica you can see how member states had different dynamics when they started using this this mechanism some of them have only had their plans adopted some of them just signed the agreement some of them just sent payment requests for first tranche and some of them are among the top five member states which have sent second or third payment requests Croatia is moving towards this third payment requests maybe we will even be better even than Spain which has the biggest envelopes regarding the fulfillment of key milestones and goals from this facility but I will be focusing more on the participation of local self-government and regional self-government units in Croatia but also in other member states what the regulation of this facility requested is when you want to adopt a plan you need to have public consultation and all member states needed to describe how they conducted this public consultation process and how they take all stakeholders opinions into for discussion we noticed in member states plans that some of them had public consultations but in the majority of cases they simply do not have enough time to have public consultations and they stated that they had maybe one or two conferences where they mostly presented what they wanted and they did not really spend a lot of time in figuring out what local self-government units really needed also conclusions of the committee of the regions show this we have the president of the European People's Party in the committee of the regions so we had a small survey performed to see what is the state of play on EU level regarding public consultation consultations and participation of local self-government units some of them had bigger participation some of them had smaller participation mostly it was in the hands of the central government and in this survey we noticed this lack of time primarily but in some time lack of lack of will of central government to include local self-government units what due to this type of adoption of plans which is a big risk is that in the implementation process we will not have enough interested parties when we launch call for proposals because these calls for proposals will not be actually modified according to real needs from the field we can already see some member states we have call for proposal then you have a lot of proposals for example kindergarten here in Croatia we had local self-government units we used all the funds immediately but in some member states we had a situation where we had call for proposals and then tenders but we did not have enough proposals or enough projects because local self-government units were not prepared for this and they did not define what exactly was the goal of such projects because local self-government units were not actually contacted beforehand regarding this analysis of the committee of the regions it is interesting that those who participated in the survey stated that the plan itself actually did not address the challenges that local self-government units face they see this plan more as something being on the central government level and less as something that needs to be implemented on local self-government unit level what we see in our auditors court this is an issue there are big differences between member states when we talk about Croatia I only have several slides on this topic we have several very important reforms and investments planned without participation of counties, cities and municipalities will not be successful it is important that we have you in this you know what you need to do because we will not be able to implement this and goals will not be fulfilled unless during this implementation of this recovery resilience plans unless we have continuous consultations and that you participate and you show how this will be helpful for you for example one of the reforms is functional merge of different cities and municipalities how and when which municipality or city will participate in this and we will see how much this goal was communicated beforehand or for example other projects or reforms regarding agricultural land so without your participation your knowledge but we can expect we will not be successful so if we don't plan beforehand for example in this initiative reparsing of agricultural land we will not be successful I think this for example next investment regarding waste water and land consolidation we will be successful also projects regarding schools what Minister mentioned these are all projects which will be on the level of local government cell units and without you we will not be able to implement it and what we can see as lessons learned we as a court when we perform our audits in member states on central government level but also on the level of regional and local several government units we see as an issue lack of flexibility you have strict deadlines which are more related to public tenders when we will sign an agreement and when something will be delivered but we know that market conditions have changed we have issues with supply chains and this all affects the deadlines which were agreed back in 2020 so this is important to take into account this shows that some new instruments that would follow the similar path as this facility they need to be significantly changed and they need to be more flexible when talking about the implementation part and also in regards to the results which need to be achieved in this facility we have more implementation and inputs than results and goals and this is something that needs to be changed in any new instruments that will follow thank you thank you very much and now we will go to the panel and when you see we heard that the situation different member states is different and they are different approaches I mean lack of time or lack of political will I mean both of them for example we ask the European Commission in one day is the consultation with local governments obligatory or not and the answer of the commission was no, it's not obligatory it can be done if the government wants to do it but it's not obligatory so it of course makes the clear reaction from the committee of regions ok so now look at the practice this is the legal base this is the political approach and now the practice in Croatia you are facing different challenges I mean like all of us in Europe the question of Covid the consequence of the crisis concerning the war but plus the earthquake so with all the consequences so at that time there is the possibility with the new plan which is coming I just read that in Croatia in your plan you have 74 reforms 74 reforms so it means it's a lot many of them what you said was the of course impossible to implement without local but it's 74 reforms in a very short time you have more than 240 milestones and targets so it's really a lot ok so what about the practical implementation how it really works in practice first I have the question from Mr Marco Marusic the prefect of Belovo Belogora sorry if I don't pronounce it very well but the floor is the old please thank you very much good afternoon everybody it is truly my pleasure to be here with you today and I can share my experiences regarding our Belovo Belogora County as previous speakers said we live in the 21st century and it has brought about many challenges and many crises and they are global and unprecedented so Croatia as well was not immune to all this these huge changes are so big so major that they impact the life of every day every person every day life of every person and of course along with our government local government units also play major role in dealing with all this because we are the first ones in the field and people we are responsible for expect solutions from us we as a county have been facing bad traffic connections and this impacts our economic power and strength and the past few years we have implemented certain things we made some steps forward thanks to the understanding of our government and now we have to finish kilometers of high speed road that would connect our county with Zagreb or Croatia's capital and with the rest of Croatia and this way after we managed to make this connection we as a county will become more competitive when it comes to economy and we will attract many investors and this will surely result in increased quality of life of our citizens my county relies on agriculture this is one of the main economic areas and this is a key generator of rural development we have land we have natural resources we have a very good land and we all the preconditions are met for future investment in ecological production because we saw during Covid-19 pandemic how self-sufficiency in food production is important and places being more independent managed to achieve better results during this pandemic so we have fiscal capacities to initiate speedy development therefore this national plan of recovery and resilience provides opportunities and possibilities through specific projects of course in collaboration with our cities and municipalities to raise the quality of life and improve the quality of life of our citizens and the inhabitants of our county and I think this is something we should all strive for we are not immune to young people leaving our county so this national plan of recovery and resilience that also aims to prevent or mitigate the consequences of crisis also provides an opportunity for us our municipalities and cities to become stronger in order to face future crisis in a better way and I'm sure we will face certain crisis in future as well so I would like to thank everybody and I'm sure that we as a local community through projects will be able to improve the quality of life of our inhabitants your last sentence was important the question is what is all about I mean the RRF the plan is in fact the end is to to reduce the consequence of different crisis but the same time is to change the quality of life so I think this is not always the same but I think the reducing it means to fulfill the loopholes but to make the quality of life is to make the progress so they are different things so that's why I think the RRF is very important that's why this is the response for the crisis but in fact this is in fact recovery and resilience is like not to repair but to reconstruct so my question is to Madame in Croatian is jupan but the feminine for the jupan jupanica so the jupanica of Pozhega from Slavonia County Antonija Ozić good afternoon everybody it is my honor to participate in this panel today as you said it yourself recovery and resilience is not only a plan for advancement but also a plan that should make us stronger at times of crisis an important sentence was uttered here by Madame Malatić this is the way of how this national plan for recovery and resilience was developed and today I realized that not all governments in the EU do the same as our programming of the national plan for recovery and resilience did not happen in the same way in all member states which surprised me because I think and we in Croatia do it in such a way and from the top government level to the lowest government level we need to collaborate and we need to be transparent and communicate and this is what we do in Croatia while developing this national plan for recovery and resilience to the voices of citizens and local and government units so all these important segments that make up the Croatian economy Croatian society and Croatian politics in general this is actually the way that Croatian Croatian Democratic Union operates this contains all the important elements for recovery and for development of the Republic of Croatia when talking about recovery in this crisis situation this national plan for recovery and resilience allocates a lot of funds for civil engineering construction of buildings schools, social institutions hospitals and so on when talking about resilience we can talk about resilience in production of food so through this national plan we foresaw the development of regional distribution centers for fruit and vegetables we opened one of such centers in Ossik recently and I strongly believe that my country will be the second county in Croatia that will signed grant agreement for the construction of this regional distribution center and when talking about what we are looking for in the future I here refer to project focused on education in my county Pozhega Slavonia through this national plan for recovery and resilience the construction of 10 kindergartens was approved and this will help families who need to find places for their children in kindergartens and this will also strengthen the economic activity of our inhabitants and also there is a huge reform focused on primary education and also single shift work of schools in secondary education we will increase the number of students in gymnasium programs of course there will be big investments in science, in high science in the Republic of Croatia and through this national plan for recovery and resilience minister Brnac was here at this panel during the introduction and funds are aimed for the development of public and tourism infrastructure healthcare tourism or health tourism especially with focus on continental tourism we know that Croatia has a well developed coastal tourism but a huge potential when it comes to continental tourism and a lot of funds from this national plan are aimed at development of continental tourism in Croatia so this meets the challenges that we are facing and that we will face in the future but also provides a clear direction of Croatia's development after using the funds from national plan for recovery and resilience you said it yourself there are 74 reference it might sound ambitious but I'm sure we'll manage to implement all this very good example how to net to have money in our country like with all gear we have zero so it means that because of the political fight in the government all the money is blocked so the local government is really a disaster but I think my question to you is only the grants doesn't require your money it's just grants how important it is for the counties that the money is without the own resources which should be given which is normal for cohesion this is 100% for the grants yes in majority of cases these are 100% amounts of grants except in cases when our project go beyond this maximum amount that can be allocated regarding the projects we implement there is a situation with the construction of kindergartens where local government units will have to participate with national funds and with their local funds when it comes to construction of kindergartens these projects regarding tourism infrastructure do have a certain limit up to which they can be funded up to 100% but after that if you surpass that limit then you have to provide your own funds but we don't have to provide our own funds for the implementation of these policies and projects but if we need to provide our own funds I'm sure that my colleagues and mayors and pre-effects will manage to provide these funds because these are extremely important projects for the development of Croatia and now let's go to I mean once again I would like to apologize for the mistake but anyway we have Mr. Ivan Jagar the mayor of the municipality of Sovenska-Bistica who is coming from the committee so please if you have the first reaction speaking from the committee but also from your situation comparing to Croatian situation what is the situation in Slovenia please the floor is yours thank you very much for giving the floor greetings from on behalf of Slovenia I would just like to first congratulate Croatia for its successful implementation these funds unfortunately in Slovenia situation is not the same regarding the implementation we are more or less at the beginning I think we requested first tranche but we have not received it as far as I know but I think that we finished these negotiations very quickly I think in June or July we received an answer from the European level but when talking about these funds I think that we we counter the same issues generally speaking this is partially from my position as a member of the committee of the regions but also as a local representative in cohesion we have this partnership relationship but here we do not need to have it at least on a formal level but if I look at the situation in Europe and Slovenia we have a lot of challenges related to it and I think these challenges are related mostly with this partnership aspect of this plan I always say that these negotiations you have on the European level then national level then local level and many times we have issues on local national relations local level very often is not incorporated in the right manner formally speaking you have these discussions as you have different member states have different conferences but the real needs on the local level that we have on the field these real needs are the issue we need to introduce them in these EU funds when talking about Slovenia I think very often this is not so I think a major issue is that this for example when implementing new funds in the future through this implementation I don't know how monitoring will end we have already prepared one report in our committee of the regions but you will find in this report the same issues that we had in regards to cohesion funds so we have centralization you have issues of discussion with local level and we must not forget bureaucracy every decade we discuss the same issues but we still don't have results so maybe commission should take these local aspects into account and to find the way that local level has this direct contact maybe even on the European level so that you have a real partnership relationship regarding the implementation in Slovenia we are not so successful we have some other local issues we don't have counties like you here we have regions but another issue we had a change in government funds we don't have EPP in power like in Croatia and third issue on the local level we have enough funds I come from bigger municipality in Slovenia and we did not find any tender where we could get funds for us and when I hear what you have here in Croatia we don't have that in Slovenia we focus more on green transition of course social aspect, health aspect and I think that we should take into account other issues territorial social cohesion I think we forget in these funds and then other issues arise from these central issues like brain drain and so on I don't know what we can do through monitoring to change some things, thank you now we should have the debate but we do have no time because we have the coffee break so I will replace the questions answers with asking the question to Ivana about your comments to the free speakers I think it will be the best way and next we will have the coffee break so Ivana please thank you thank you you showed what was said in the introduction there are different situations in different member states in Slovenia you can't even recognize yourself in these priorities which were adopted on the central government level because needs of the local government units were not taken into account differences in Croatia we launch a call for proposals we have a lot of interest and then we take into account local goals and needs at the local level in Croatia we had with asset funds in the beginning for the 2014-2020 perspective at the beginning it was clear that for example entrepreneurs were not consulted because we would launch a call for proposals but we had no interest because they were not consulted if it were based on consultations with the entrepreneurs then they would be interested in those proposals the same was with local government units so member states which did not base this on partnership had and will have problems with the implementation with targets from this facility all the commission says that they did not insist on partnership like in cohesion policy but in the regulation on this facility there was an article insisting on public consultations they asked for all stakeholders to be consulted on a certain market not only local and regional self-government units but NGOs youth organizations universities scientists organizations of entrepreneurs so it was important to consult everyone and to then modify this facility so that it responds to real needs some member states did so some did not those that did not do this they created problems in the implementation phase so they would be facing issues in fulfilling their goals and this is something that was important to avoid in the very beginning of the plan the lesson is for everyone for the commission that such large financing instruments should not be adopted very quickly it is better to invest the time at the beginning in quality preparation so that implementation will be simpler because if you speed up in the first beginning phase then you will have issues later because situations are different in member states I think the advantage of Croatia was that because we implemented and this should be the same in cohesion member states but we implemented all consultations partnerships that we used in asset funds this knowledge about local self-government units could be used when we adopted this recovery and resilience plan and everything that we see as important and required cannot be financed by cohesion envelope and is related to developing resilience because this fund must be focused on development projects projects that will enable a larger and better resilience needs to be used and this is how some member states by using earlier consultations which were implemented in cohesion policy they used this information to create better recovery and resilience plans it is on us on the auditor's court to control this because we do not have the ideal blueprint that the commission says that it's for the future that this is the plan that we need to use in the future we see a lot of gaps and disadvantages that we need to modify for the future but with two comments one comment to Madame Manetis just said this is a lack of imagination in the commission and in the parliament because we put it into the text we put it the consultation with local and regional NGOs social partners etc but it was not obligatory it was just suggestion to do it if the government didn't do it there are no consequences we corrected it now the Zikrit Muresan was the reporter for the Repower EU as you know Repower EU would be added to RRF in this case we added the text obligatory consultation with local government because now we know that if we don't write obligatory it will not be obligatory and the second remark for you as mayors jupans etc and me as a former mayor and former president of region please decentralization is not granted decentralization depending on the situation in the concrete member states if you have the government who is open to decentralization it's decentralized if you have the government who is not very open to decentralization there will be no consultation at all so that's why I think that this is the very modest suggestion to the controller to the court of auditors please look at the text because if the commission doesn't put obligatory the consequence of the action of the commission in some of the member states can lead to centralization I mean the European Union policy can lead to centralization if we don't have the clear message that's why you should observe very clearly how lucky you are in Croatia that your government the tension between local and government is normal it's always it's always but one of the governments is opening the decentralization and giving the floor for the local the other governments not my government not at all so that's why let's be very careful when we look at the watch the hands of the governments what they are doing because as I said decentralization is never granted forever it can be higher or lower it's changing so I would like we can probably applause the panelist they are also at your disposal during the coffee break Ivan thank you very much thank you the panelist for all of us member of the parliament it's important to know it we would like to have the arguments because we are preparing legislation so we need the arguments from the field from the practitioners what we should do we shouldn't do thank you once again and have a good time for coffee break thank you dear colleagues welcome back welcome back to the second part of our event it is my pleasure now to introduce to all of you the minister of finance of Croatia Michael Primorac thank you very much minister for joining us this morning it is my pleasure to introduce to you the minister because the Croatian economy is doing well but we need to make sure that it will continue to do well also in the future and this is why I am very happy that we have a chance to talk to the minister about the role which EU funds play in the development of the Croatian economy the role which EU funds play for investments for modernizing the economy for making sure that it becomes even stronger that it stays competitive internationally of course at the beginning of the year we also that Croatia joined the Euro area it joined the Euro area because it deserves and because it fulfills all the conditions this is a clear sign that the Croatian economy is stable it is doing well but of course we need to make sure that as the budget was managed very well since 2016 here by Croatian authorities under the leadership of the prime minister we need to make sure that public money is well spent that the budget is well spent that the economy gets even stronger and that it is reformed so EU funds, reforms managing people's finances, people's money with care these are subjects that we are looking forward to hearing from the minister of finance this morning minister thank you very much for joining us on a busy day the floor is yours please thank you very much dear ladies and gentlemen first of all I would like to say thank you to the EPP group from the European Parliament and also to the European committee of the regions for this invitation thank you very much thank you for inviting me to join you today at this event and it is my pleasure to welcome you all we live in really challenging times after the Covid crisis issues that we have with the pandemic in Croatia and with the earthquake Croatian economy like other member states economies and also outside the EU try to find a way how they could answer these challenges some economies managed to do so more successfully, some less successfully it is my extreme pleasure to say that the Croatian economy after this Covid year where we had a significant economic downturn like other economies and economic slowdown and of course harmful consequences to the state budget next year we managed to achieve a 13% growth and we return to the pre-pandemic year levels of course the funds from the EU are funds which are available to us within the recovery resilience facility and does it contribute to the resilience of the Croatian economy in that context I would like to emphasize that the topics like using EU funds and especially the recovery resilience mechanism are on the agenda of every EU government and also on the agenda of Croatian government and this is quite important topic so once again thank you for inviting me EU next gen EU instrument is the response from the EU without president which gives us optimism and an opportunity for our economy for the upcoming years this is a large opportunity but there will be a lot of work in the usage of these programs and the most important part is the implementation part and this is what we will be doing in the upcoming period in our national recovery and resilience plan the most important focus is on reforms so to use funds member states need to fulfill indicators consist of reforms and investments in Croatia reforms are key especially in the first years of implementation and these reforms are focused on raising the level of competitiveness and green and digital transformation I can say that 40.3% of total funds planned for reforms and investments are the funds that support climate goals and 20.4% of the funds also support digital goals in that sense we expect strong effect of the measures that will be implemented in the energy and transport sector in management of waste waters and also in reconstruction of buildings total 5.5 billion euros of grants that we have at our disposal within this facility it is really an opportunity without president for our economy so successful and timely implementation is one of the key priorities of our government in that sense this whole implementation process is being continuously and closely managed with strong political support of the government we have several levels for our management structure and also for monitoring and implementation this includes management committee which is chaired by our prime minister Mr. Plankovic he is responsible for political management but also for the monitoring of the entire process also ministry of finance and this is my honor is in charge within the implementation of this project as the coordination body which monitors the implementation but also coordinates all the processes within the ministries and between the ministries but also between the ministries and the office of the prime minister so in practice how does this look like at least once a month we have this coordination on the government level we have every day continuous support by the ministry of finance provided to the beneficiaries and also support from the prime minister to all the bodies which are a part of this implementation both on political and operational level close cooperation of ministry of finance with the office of the prime minister has shown to be the most efficient way of achieving strategic goals and I'm glad to have here Mr. Savic who is with the team from the ministry of finance is continuous contact and we are monitoring all indicators and we try to resolve all difficulties that occur it is my pleasure to highlight results that we have already achieved and they have been achieved due to good work and coordination and excellent cooperation between institutions we have already received some compliments from the commission regarding this topic so Croatia has been recognized as a good example also regarding payments from the facility for recovery and resilience for reforms and investments defined by the national recovery resilience plan we have received over 2.5 billion euros so we had that pre-financing period we have received two tranches of 700 million euros each and for getting these funds we needed to fulfill a number of indicators for the first tranche we needed to fulfill 34 indicators for the second tranche 25 indicators and currently we need to fulfill additional 45 indicators so this is over 40% of total amount of grants so Croatia has already used regarding the speed of usage Croatia is third in the EU which has submitted a second payment request and we are among the most successful member states the importance of these payments lies in the fact that these are the highest amounts ever paid to the Croatian state budget through these funds by fulfilling 45 indicators Croatia will be able to use another tranche in the amount of 700 million euros and in the first 3 years of usage of funds Croatia will have received by the end of 2023 over 53% of total amount of grants what's important to emphasize is not the implementation so it's not the most important issue is not to use to get these funds the most important thing is to implement and fulfill reform goals and to realize investments so our agenda for our plan includes a number of reforms in several sectors I will only mention some for which I think they are the most important ones first of all educational reform we also have infrastructural modifications plan in regards to the labor market and its coordination with social service institutions improvement of the pension system and social welfare system working on the issues of social exclusion also reform of the judicial system state administration system reform especially in the area of wages in public administration and also mergers of some administration units providing support in corporate governance in state owned enterprises and also sale or activation of a part of the state portfolio also energy efficiency reforms renewable energy and sustainable transport these are just some of the topics that I feel are most important also with 31st of January 2023 from the national recovery resilience plans we have published 205 tender calls for proposals worth 2.9 2.5 million euros so this will be a total of 5.3 billion euros worth of the total amount of grants and calls of proposals and tenders so you can see this is all in support of performing reforms and investments and this will help to develop creation economy especially in times of inflationary pressures also during 2023 within the repower EU and recovery resilience plan focused on energy challenges that the whole of EU is facing we will use the opportunity to finance additional investments in creations energy infrastructure this will allow us to have continuous energy supply supply chains I am talking about the LNG terminal capacity growth we will also invest in sustainable energy sources in transport and also regarding the regulation on recovery and resilience amendments Croatia will have an additional 270 million euros at its disposals and also 3.6 billion euros of loans that we have not used so far and we will be using them with this goal in mind successful implementation of this plan and also the entry of Croatia into the eurozone have helped to strengthen international position of Croatia on international level and also in international financial markets we have seen how reputation and credit rating of Croatia has grown so currently Croatia is at its highest historical credit rating level right now we will do everything we can to fulfill these goals and to achieve success in implementing reforms and investments to use funds available to us but also to take care to build an economy which will provide additional resilience and protection to Croatian citizens to our economy to our enterprises and to have a better life thank you very much I will use this opportunity to say that I have to leave because we have meetings at the PM's office all day so I will not be able to be present at the second panel discussion but I wish you success and pleasant rest of the day thank you very much Minister, thank you very much I am detailing and presenting the impact which the recovery funds have on the Croatian budget, on the economy and also what was already achieved so far as we said Croatia is the EU member state that has received already 40% of the national recovery and resilience funds that it is entitled to 2.2 billion out of 5.5 billion Croatia only together with the European Commission the pre-financing first disbursement and the second disbursement so the plan is on track we feel the money is being absorbed fast but we also feel it is being spent well and this will also be the topic of our second panel because in the first panel we discussed about how we make sure that we absorb money based on the priorities of local communities and we are discussing the following the title of the panel is enhancing synergies between the recovery funds and the traditional EU funds key to a speedy recovery and resilience because we want to make sure that recovery funds are being used in synergy with EU funds, we want to make sure that they finance projects which otherwise cannot receive funding from other sources and we want to make sure that there are additional investments they support entrepreneurs they support innovative entrepreneurs which create jobs and which create additional investments to discuss all of these I will invite now the second panel on stage it will be moderated by Olga who is our friend from the Committee of the Regions he's the president of VPP group in the Committee of the Regions and of course the president of VPP the mayor of Novskar we have please join our colleagues so Olga Maria we have of course our colleague from the European Parliament which is very active in the Regional Development Committee and we have Marco Pavic the chair of the Committee on Regional Development and European funds in the Croatian Parliament I will leave you now with second panel and of course he will also give the floor to Zvonimir Savic, the special advisor of the Prime Minister, the Mr. Recovery Plan here in Croatia. On this note I wish you all a good debate and once again Marko Minister, thank you very much for taking time from your busy day-to-day to be with us, thank you. Thank you, thank you very much, Siegfried. And dear friends, firstly I would like to share my personal reflection. I'm very happy and very proud that I can be here today with you in Zagreb and it reminds me some memories from 2010 when I became Marshal of my West Pomeranian region, very beautiful, one of the biggest in terms of area, something like 45% of Croatia, two million of inhabitants and then I became a president of Polish region association and in most time we decided to establish close link and very fruitful cooperation with our Croatian friends from association of Croatian Japania. Unfortunately right now we have some kind of break in our bilateral cooperation because of this COVID of course, but I remember exactly the first topic we discussed in those time and of course the first topic was our Polish assistance, it was in 2011 for example, in providing a knowledge and good practices to the process of implementation of EU funds because it was just before your accession to the European Union. We share our knowledge, I even sent my people from my office to Croatian regions to share the knowledge and right now we are in the moment when you are in the Eurozone we are not. You are very advanced in recovery and resilience, implementation of recovery and resilience fund and as you know the Poland have the money all money blocked. So what can I say? It is that I'm very proud of your successes and I keep my fingers crossed to follow this good way. I hope that we will catch up you in the in the near future after elections this year in Poland because it is our third meeting on the same topic first as it was mentioned was organized in Poland and then we noticed 0% of the implementation of recovery fund in Poland so it was not very positive discussion I would say. Then we had a discussion in Lisbon when we discussed that unfortunately because of this socialist government approach they cannot implement recovery plan very very efficiently and right now we see the difference in Croatia I'm very happy to be here and on behalf of the EPP group in the Committee of Regents and moderating this panel and I hope that it will be very very very valuable for all of us not only among our Croatian friends but for all our EPP members in the in the Committee of Regents I see after this first panel that you follow them our main idea that we as EPP responsible politicians we are not spending European money we are investing European money and how do you invest it will be the topic of our second panel before of that I would like to give a floor to our special guest Zvonimir Savic special advisor to Prime Minister for economic issues the floor is yours good afternoon and thank you for the invitation I will speak in Croatian but for our distinguished guests I prepared the presentation in English to make it more clear after these introductory speeches you've noticed that the dynamic of implementation of an RP RP is very satisfactory so I will try to sum up everything from my position and from my role as the main coordinator of the drafting process and then monitoring and implementation as well of this and our RP on behalf of the Prime Minister's Office of course in cooperation with the Ministry of Finance because the Ministry of Finance is in charge of drafting and implementation of this National Plan for Recovery and Resilience and as you have heard already everything is implemented in coordination between the Prime Minister's Office and the Ministry of Finance and this has proven to be a very good cooperation I would like to sum up key information that you've heard already and have been repeated several times and Mr. Murashan mentioned all this many times as well and I'm happy to see that Europe is aware of everything that we are doing but this is also poses an obligation to state administration bodies and regional level and the government to be better and more successful. The negotiations that Prime Minister mentioned this morning in terms of amount that Croatia has at its disposal from the recovery and resilience facility and grants along with Greece we have the largest share of grants in relation to the size of our economy almost 10% is the value of these 5.5 billion euros of grants compared to our annual GDP which of course obliges us to prepare reforms and investments that can absorb this of course when you have a huge amount of money at your disposal this means that in some countries this may pose difficulties how to clearly define investments that contribute to our economic recovery growth and development so all the targets and goals that European Union has defined by creating this recovery and resilience facility. Due to this state of affairs and this huge amount of money we decided to strategically define the document of national recovery and resilience plan that on how to implement this 5.5 billion euros into our investment so we decided to take the existing strategic documents the program of the government of the Republic of Croatia national reform program that already defines our needs for reference in aligned with the European Commission we also took into account country specific recommendations this is the document aligned with the European Commission so these are specific recommendations that we have to have our national program of reforms that is adopted every year as the basis for the reforms that will be implemented and we took into account two mechanisms that we these are the measures that we have to implement as a preparation for the eurozone and we took into account national development strategy as a document that has been communicated from the lowest level our local government units to the parliament so it has been adopted by the parliament so this is our development strategy up to 2030 so only those reforms and only those investments that can find basis in these strategic documents are the ones funded from our national recovery and resilience plan if a reform or investment is not rooted in one of these documents it did not become part of this plan so this was our strategic approach we developed the plan late 2020 to the first half 2021 so this recovery and resilience plans please I would not recommend reading it thoroughly because it has 1266 pages but if you are interested in a specific topic you will definitely find it in there here on the right you can see the components as our Prime Minister mentioned this morning so we have the area of economy over 50 percent of grants out of this 5.5 million is for economy this is for tourism agriculture financial instruments for SMEs and also large companies one path is for public administration science and education 15 percent that's 1 billion euros for science and education you heard this morning 200 million euros for kindergartens 300 for primary schools for construction equipping and so on this is a huge investment cycle I'm talking about investments but of course it also supports their reference in this area 4% is the labor market 5% is health and a significant part of 12% is focused on building reconstruction and renovation unfortunately this is related to earthquake so this is how we divided these 5.5 million of grants into these components these areas however to receive these funds and use them we need to implement specific number of reforms in all of these areas so we decided to be very ambitious there you will see later on I'm going to mention number of reforms in the labor market health in energy sector in water management in transport and by this I mean adoption of new laws new strategies new regulations new rule books and some of them are more significant than the others and they require quite an effort from the ministry and the government and also other stakeholders in the society because everyone is for these reforms until they are not but we need to implement these reforms they are part of the government's program they're part of the national plan of reforms it is part of the recommendations of the European Commission either we are going to implement them and then get the funds or not or we are going to give up on this so implementation is an imperative for us we have developed these reforms in an ambitious way and this slide is a print screen from the report of the European Court of Auditors that analyzed specific recovery and resilience plans from other member states to see how ambitious they are and to what extent they include the obligatory reforms from country specific recommendations written by the European Commission labor market health science education if you look at this more closely this green part that says substantially addressed this means that one country has just substantially addressed or defined and obliged to implement reforms in the areas proposed look at Croatia in the recommendations for 2019 there were four major recommendations we decided to implement reforms in all these four areas also these recommendations of the European Commission in 2020 as well so on the side of reforms our recovery and resilience plans is very ambitious people from Croatia know that some of the laws that we have been adopting there are strikes in front of the building of the government of the Republic of Croatia there are demonstrations so these are very sensitive matters but several times today we mentioned that we collaborate with the regions and we have public consultations for all these new laws and at a local level we talk about these laws and they are being voted on in the parliament they're being read in the parliament and we are doing all this in order to contribute to recovery and resilience and benefit of all of us look at other countries it doesn't matter actually the point of this slide is to show you the effort that we have invested and we never gave up on our reforms some states gave up on certain reforms and on their implementation however if you give up on some reform then you're not able to receive all these funds and we would have to give up on these 5.5 million of grants so you saw our ambition so creation recovery and resilience plan has 372 indicators that must be met within a specific period of time and deadline so 100 we have 145 milestones these are reforms laws strategies regulations rulebooks and so on something that is mostly concern concerning state administration you've heard something about this and there 227 targets these are investments individual investments something has to be done within certain period of time we have to launch a tender we have to equip something and so on so we have to meet reforms in order to get the money for our investments this is the time frame until middle of 2022 at that moment we had to meet for 54 reforms so these are laws strategies rulebooks and so on in water management transport energy sector education whatever 54 reforms so we have met oh we fulfilled all of them so 100% 54 out of 54 many of you will know that to achieve 100% of nothing is close to zero but this instrument enable this these red columns this is a number of reforms in a specific that need to be fulfilled in a specific period so first one is 33 so 33 reforms by the end of 2021 then 21 by mid 2022 we fulfilled 33 and 21 reform as well for the second part of the 2022 this is the third column and we are now finalizing this we are now finalizing all the reference that we obliged to implement there were 32 reference we will finalize all of them this means that we will achieve the level of 86 reforms out of 86 planned ones so 100% and after we achieve 86 reference that is over 60% of all reforms planned within the national recovery and resilience plan in only one year this doesn't exist anywhere else so if one indicator is not met if we do not fulfill one reform then the prime minister's office and Ministry of Finance will not request the payment for the following period and then the investments will stop so this means that this is in all of our best interest to implement these reforms because there are no investments if we do not achieve these reforms so we should all support each other in this task blue column tells us tells us about the number of investments every six months so when you put all these blue ones together these are investments and the red ones are reforms and then they make up these 372 indicators and we need to fulfill all this by the middle of 2026 these are preconditions to receive these funds so you heard that we get these funds every six months we got a pre financing in September 2021 then last year first trench and third column are the reforms and investments that we fulfilled in the first half of 2022 we met we fulfilled everything and we received the payment of the second tranche this is the second installment of 700 million so when you put all these three columns together you've you've heard of this this is 2.2 billion euros has already been paid out so all these three individual payments are the highest ever individual payments in the past 10 years that Croatia has received from the European Union so red columns are those that we need to fulfill in the time ahead so the first one that you see on the side this is our third tranche of recovery and resilience plan so we are it is underway after we finalize it we will ask for an additional 700 million that will be 2.9 billion euros so over 50% of the recovery and resilience plan within a year and a half so and then you will see where is this allocated so this is a quite good dynamic so my minister of finance is not here anymore but he's very satisfied with the payment so I'm going to tell you where these payments are allocated so the first column 6.3 million euros we had this this is these are the grants that we had our disposal in the beginning and in the meantime due to this calculation formula of these funds for recovery and resilience this amount was reduced to point five point five because we grew very quickly we developed very quickly but we started with 6.3 billion euros so up to now plan investments and finalized it so planned tenders and finalized one reach 2.9 billion euros so until the 31st of January if you put together all finalized tenders and all calls and financial instruments and all of this this comes up to half of this 6.3 only in a year or year and a half and as the minister of finance mentioned by the end of this year we aim to have over over 80% of tenders and even if 10% is not fulfilled I think 70% is still quite a good achievement so the government and the ministry and the representatives of municipalities and cities are additionally motivated by this and we all want to make use of this opportunity up to 2026 I don't want to say that some of the member states are slower or weaker but they simply give us an additional motivation to keep up with our current speed when you hear about Croatia they say we are we are last in this or that but this has changed look at this slide you can see vertical vertical columns are member states and horizontal are phases in the preparation and implementation of the recovery resilience plan first one is light blue this is the information whether member state has delivered recovery resilience plan to the commission Croatia means that we were 16 in place who delivered this document first was Portugal second line whether this plan was endorsed by the commission dark blue it was endorsed by for everyone third whether some of the countries member states were pre-finance fourth light green whether operational agreements were signed between member state and commission yellow whether member state has sent a payment request you can send a request if you fulfill all the reforms and investments that were planned here already we have situation that some of the member states did not send payment request then you have first payment disbursed so it was dispersed we received it we received first 700 million euros then second payment request so if we fulfill all the reforms investments you can send a second request then you can see which member states sent second payment request currently we have seven member states we were third in line among the states which sent this second payment request and we already received in December last year we received the second payment disbursement Portugal a couple of days ago received second payment so we have five countries which received second installment three country two countries already sent a third payment request and we will be the third so Croatia is third according to the dynamic of dynamic of usage of these funds so this is a message to regional local self-government units that we need to keep up with this dynamic you know we were third in in world football championship before but now we need to show but through synergy communication between ministries and local level we can have a dynamic that is satisfying for all of us so creation Greece have the highest amount that they were allocated according to the size of their economies you have to keep in mind if you take a look at the slide of the cohesion policy Croatia has the highest level of amounts according or in comparison with the size of its economy Deloitte provided a comparative analysis couple of months ago regarding the usage of recovery zillions funds if you take a look of the countries which have the highest percentage of drawdowns of funds you have top countries with the highest top countries with the highest receipt of funds Croatia is third if you see how much grants we received until now so we are in the top three countries and then you have top countries with highest mean relative speed of receipt of funds again we are in the top three so let us keep up with this result let us maintain this result let us use these funds because we have a lot of tenders we have a lot of needs that we need to fulfill and the assessment is that by the end of the implementation of this plan our GDP could experience a 4% growth so you can see how much this plans contributes to our credit rating and perception that our administration has the capacity to organize implement these plans although we are the youngest member state in the EU our credit rating you can see Fitch, Moody's and S&P you can see it on the on the on the right side of course nobody wants to be at the bottom on this credit rating scale in 2016 we were on speculative grade ratings BBB now look at us according to latest data or reports from these agencies we almost reach the A level and when you read why is this so for the last couple of months besides entering the eurozone agencies have been monitoring the implementation of EU funds and usage of these funds within the recovery and resilience program so you can see a significant significant improvement of Croatia we had a lot of activities in the front loading part so we we are currently working on receiving the payment in the form of the third tranche and what's most important we have strong political support for in for implementing this recovery and resilience plan because without that we would not be able to fulfill and implement these reforms so since 2022 according to all three agencies you can see the the level of our credit rating currently we have the highest credit rate credit rating in Croatia's history Croatia is the only country since the beginning of the Russian aggression to Ukraine that received that received a better credit rating from all three agencies and this is not by chance and our goal is to maintain this dynamic to continue with economic development and growth and recovery and to maintain and keep our people here in our country so thank you very much for your attention thank you Mr. Savage for this very comprehensive presentation and very informative I'm really under really impressed how ambitious plan you have but on the other hand how professionally you can you manage to implement it so so it is really very impressive on this big picture and this big data and right now I would like to during our during our panel go down and ask firstly madam Maria Kuzhmishmayer of Novska how this this money actually inflate all the ordinary people on the ground on and I'm I would like to ask you for sharing with us your your experiences regarding to recovery resilience funds but on the other hand how this traditional European money managed to change your your city because we have to we would like to discuss how to how to build some kind of synergy between both resources of funds so please madam Kuzhmishmayer of Florizios can you hear me hello to everyone Novska is really a small town with eleven thousand people and in 2017 until now we have been working on preparing and implementing projects mostly financed by EU funds until now we have realized realized or used 40 million euros which is a lot for such a small town taking into account of covering all areas for the smallest investments for children for young people we provide support entrepreneurs craftsmen agricultural workers but we also take care of our aging population we have to be socially sensitive and take care of all of those who need our help as the government is trying to listen their counties we need to listen to our citizens and we need to focus our policies and our further investments on them what is in significant through small projects and especially Novska has a good example of cooperation with associations for young people European social fund we have invested in public infrastructure we have renovated and refurbished spaces we have managed to to to re to once again activate those spaces so young people can use those spaces they can be incubators for social events we also worked on popularizing stem area and what is key we focused our economy on some new industries Novska before everything we have we have wood as our main industry area and since 2018 till now with the help of EU funds we have started and we focused on new industries specifically gaming industry in 2018 we got funds for entrepreneurship incubator and we wanted to know whether we should provide space for entrepreneurs from different economic areas or to focus on one so we focused on gaming and new technologies since then until now this project is maybe the best example on how one one project and EU funds can contribute to wider development so gradually we introduced free English language in kindergarten with the support of Ministry of Education and we have a new new educational agenda in our high schools a technician for developing games we also have educations on the basis of which people are gaining new competitiveness on the labor market and also we encourage them to start their own startups we have 10 new crafts and companies focused especially and specifically on the gaming and industry and this the trend of young people leaving Croatia which has started which started back back in 2013 we reversed this trend because we had a lot of young people coming to Novska because of this gaming industry and currently we are slowly losing available spaces for these new young people coming this is the result of investments from the EU again another thing I have to highlight since 2018 Novska with the support of ministries and the government of Republic of Croatia but also from the county Novska is a town in CISAC Moslavina County has the highest increase in the number of new crafts and startups and what is key information is support regional support from the government we wouldn't have the results that we have and you can see that in the statistical data in the number of employed persons a reduction of the number of unemployed persons and the amount of the town budget before we had 40 million Kunas and today we had 90 million Kunas of the town budget this these are the benefits of EU funds and support from the government of Republic of Croatia without that we wouldn't have these results and what is still to come are opportunities for financing new projects Novska has prepared in the amount of 100 million Kunas sorry 100 million euros the biggest part refers to the next step in the development of gaming industry this is a gaming center that I think will contribute to new economic and social growth that that would be that would be short if you need more information very much maybe at this stage as we are a little bit out of shadow but thank you because you prove that this European money and especially this recovery money can not only improve the standard of our public service and quality of life of our citizens but also help to rebuild our local economy and it is quite interesting how you managed to rebuild it from this traditional based on wood industry to to modern gaming I'm quite curious and maybe we will have an opportunity to discuss how you are successful on that and as I understood as 54% of of money from your national recovery program is dedicated to the economy I think that that's your company company from your startups and company from your city can can be can benefit from this money as well so so it is quite good example of building synergy right now I would like to give a floor to Mr. Tomislav Sokol member of European Parliament and member of Regi committee maybe to to come back to this higher level because I think that's implementing this recovery and resilient found it is our common challenge and if we fail we we can't afford for a failure but we know a lot of obstacles so we are right now talking about the about leaders because Croatia is a leader in implementing but but certainly you know that in different countries we have different challenges what what do you think if we should change something because there are a lot of some kind of that asked for example to prolong the term of of of finalizing completing all this investments because for many many countries 2026 is not available I would I would say what are discussions about on that topic in the in the European Parliament and what is discussion how to strengthen this synergy between traditional money and to this RF money thank you very much I will speak creation because because of the audience definitely definitely yes definitely this is something new it's a novelty I first want to focus on differences between an RRP and traditional financing from Cohesion Policy this is an entire new European budget and it's temporary it's not as Cohesion Policy it's one-off situation and we need to spend these funds in a specific context in which we found ourselves due to COVID crisis and in that sense its main objectives differ from Cohesion Policy so when we talk about Cohesion Policy we have convergence focus is on less developed regions where here we focus on national programs and we take into account general national perspective and the main goal is to encourage economic growth and development to recover from COVID of course there are a lot of similarities and overlapping areas if we look at the main objectives of NRRP and if we compare this with thematic objectives of Cohesion Policy we can see that some things do overlap especially digitalization and everything related to environmental protection everything that is green and here and we need to have in mind these synergies and national plans of recovery and resilience have to explain the complementarity of their national plans with the existing funding sources which includes Cohesion so states should foresee this and align financing from NRRP with other financing sources such as Cohesion. When talking about prolonging it's difficult to talk about this in this phase because it's relatively early but of course not all states are at the same level and this is something that we will have to have in mind but we shouldn't start talking about some delays right now because then we would encourage them at the beginning to lag behind we want to encourage them to meet the benchmarks and and to be you know very quick and efficient in all this and another thing so talking about delays and implementation of these national plans this is related to administrative capacities so I'm talking about synergies with Cohesion the focus of the commission and national administrations is has been from since 2020 until today was on recovery and resilience plans so we are already lagging behind with Cohesion so conditionally speaking this should happen in parallel but the focus was much more on recovery and resilience and this goes first but if we start to prolong this right at the beginning then we will not be able to meet the goals with the Cohesion fund so we need to talk about how to strengthen capacities administrative capacities at national levels in order to avoid problems in 2026 2027 with the Cohesion financing and we in the parliament fought for two things despite the original proposal from the commission and it was especially important for Croatia and for less developed countries is to have the maximum co-financing rate of 85 percent this multi-annual financial framework was to bring it back to 75 percent before the financial crisis so that would mean that less developed local government units municipalities and counties this would pose a huge problem for them so we would have to co-finance each project with 30 percent or more and so the ones that need the funds the most would find themselves in the worst position therefore we fought for this 85 percent of co-financing rate because we want to focus these funds where they're most needed so this is what we did at the european level and we discussed about this in the parliament and to conclude I think that states we should provide help to the states but we should also push them to work as much and as well as they can and not give them the possibility and talk about delays right at the beginning because this way we would enable them to lag behind in spending and allocating these funds because we could face issues with cohesion fund then I have to fully agree that at this stage it is too early to discuss about prolonging but such ideas were mentioned during our last meeting so that's why I was very curious about it but I think that at this stage it would be demotivating for a lot of our partners right now I would like to give a floor to Mr Marco Pavic who is a member of Croatian parliament and chair of committee on the regional development and european funds and my question will be about implementation of the national recovery program in practice because I can imagine because as we mentioned it is not only about spending money not only about investing money but it is all about reforms as we were informed you have very very ambitious plan of reforms in absolutely all areas 145 milestone and how your parliament support these reforms what you're from your perspective is the most challenging and and what you are expecting in the end of the day after finalizing and successfully implemented a successful implementation of this of this program what will be the how Croatia will look like thank you for your question I will also speak in Croatian at the beginning I would just like to set the stage on negotiations and maybe add to what colleague Sokol mentioned regarding our recovery and resilience plan and multi-annual national framework so when Croatia puts all the financing sourcing together up to 2030 we had 25 billion euros comparing this with the previous financial envelope up to 2020 we had 10.7 billion euros so we have two and a half times more from various funds also this is the power of EPP and HDZ we have people who know how to negotiate who are familiar with european policies and when we negotiated about CPR regulation 2014 2020 Croatia did not react there's an item saying that the country's experiencing crisis in 2008 and access the EU before 2013 would receive 10 percent more to cohesion Croatia did not ask for it we could have had 10 billion more now we have negotiated 15 billion off from standard and 10 billion from recovery and resilience and one billion from Solidarity Fund when looking at total payments of membership of to Brussels and the payments that we received not contractual but what's the real benefit for Croatia we are 10.5 billion euros in plus out of which 2.2 billion euros from the national recovery and resilience plan so NRRP in the payments from Brussels makes up to 20 percent of what came from Brussels when talking about the absorption of these funds they're well this everything is well developed and i'm happy that a colleague Savic gave an overview of how we planned all this from the national development strategies this is the project that i managed for a year governments programs so all strategic documents we created a matrix and we took into account time and what can be financed from which fund good example is recovery reconstruction after the earthquake you knew you know that there was a huge earthquake in Zagreb with damages of over 12 billion euros 12 percent of this national recovery and resilience plans is used for the reconstruction after the earthquake we received funds to recover for after this earthquake in Zagreb and Banovina and we managed to use solidarity fund for construction and reconstruction and what is not paid from solidarity fund can be paid from the fund for recovery and resilience up to 2026 and then on top of that we have standard funds up to 2030 the same principle was used for all the components in the system from education where the envelope 2014 2020 we managed to have many many kindergartens in rural areas now we have 680 million euros 10 education and what will not be used from constructed from standard funds then we have national recovery and resilience plan and everything is systemized very well i will give another example for entrepreneurs i think that is very important providing support to printers for example european commission has asked to invest 300 million euros in reducing co2 transmissions in transport with with subsidies for electrical cars we don't have any production of electrical cars besides mr remats so we negotiated that we use 150 million euros for research and development and developing autonomous taxi vehicles development which will be done by remats and 150 million will be provided through subsidies a couple of measures was from the ministry of labor but a part of the measures is for employment measures if you're a new company or startup you can get 20 000 euros from the recovery resilience plan and you can also get vouchers for upskilling or reskilling and 50 million euros will be used for these vouchers and in in the end this this is a conference mostly for mayors and prefects there are no cities or counties which has not double tripled or quadrupled their budgets by using EU funds mayor of novska maybe is modest but the project that they developed with gaming industry so small town on the margins of it was on the margins now is the gaming center gaming center and they are managing that that is a great success like for example we had a mayor in poshaga slavonia county we had new projects there and this synergy this synergy comes from the fact that the prime minister and all prefects have joined meeting every six months where they they work on these projects and to conclude with a concrete answer the role of the parliament in this process was governed by the need to have reforms for different packages mr morris son we we we was present where we had a new package of EU related laws we had to change around 100 laws and bylaws to be able to enter the the eurozone i was a minister for the labor sector before and in my last years of my mandate there wasn't a lot of people who wanted to to work in that area of amending laws especially regarding social partnerships uh mrs malatich mentioned capacities i'm glad that we have a colleague from our central agency for implementing new programs safu this is consult consultation with stakeholders so before the government presented the summary of their proposals we had consultations with stakeholders to be able to improve our plans additionally we want to include stakeholders as much as possible regardless of a short time period and what we've heard now what is key now for the implementation and here i have to criticize european commission regarding the the level of technical assistance from other funds we have the same people working on the national recovery resilience plans and other funds and that means that maybe in the future when we have several financing lines we will possibly not have enough of quality people who will be able to handle all of this which are implementing right now recovery and the resilience funds that we don't have some kind of special support on the other hand it is 100 percent co-finance so so it is still very very attractive and beneficial thank you very much i would like to maybe only three points which really impressed me the first really very very professional drafting and implementing the national recovery and resilience program in Croatia really congratulations on that second we were talking about the synergy and i think that we that you in a very wise way built some kind of mechanism building this synergy between traditional european money and this national recovery program but i think that it is all because of political synergy between all levels under very strong leadership of prime minister plankovich with very active and influential european level vice presidents schuitzer and very active influential me peace who participated actively today thank you very much young active and professional ministers and members of parliament former ministers as well you know i'm really impressed about the quality of your work uh 15 out of i saw as prime minister mentioned 15 out of 20 jupania govern and 40 percent of cities governed by hdc and it is the the way how how to reach the political success and how to reach success in implementing the cohesion political cohesion as well i just want to say one thing when we talk about results now we should mention the legacy of the previous socialist governments which ruled from 11 2015 when we were at the end of contracting traditional eu funds from cohesion policy when we reached power in 2016 we only had six percent of contracted and we were in the programming period 2014 2020 and one of the reasons why why we we were late in using traditionally funds because we were at the back we were lagging behind so the first programming period compared to the second programming period we started at the beginning and you can see that we are among the leading ones in europe we were one the first who signed the partnership agreement for using cohesion fund uh funds and we are at the european top when socialist government was ruling we were at the back so i just wanted to provide an additional perspective regarding the political party in power wait and it is one more proof that what i mentioned about the professional and strong leadership of hdc in epp thank you thank you very much the end of our event thank you all for joining we are leaving zagheb today as epp group with the conviction that firstly uh authorities here in korea are aware of the importance of this instrument both national level and local level we feel is very well informed it is committed and we also feel that the coordination and the um political commitment to to it is is significant um of course that the upcoming years will not be easy because the recovery and resilience facilities and instrument with investments but also with reforms as we discussed before so far korea has managed to implement all of the reforms that it is required to implement korea has reached all of the milestones and targets but of course some difficult milestones and targets remain ahead so it is very important that um the authorities remain committed and also at legislative level colleagues in parliament to implementing reforms so that korea can benefit also from the next disbursements without any without any delays it is also very important that the mayors remain alert remain active um come up with the projects fast because time pressure will increase everything has to be finalized by the end of 2026 this is the european legislation that's when next generation EU ends so time pressure will be big this is why we will have to work together we do everything that we can we adopted legislation at european level fast we are also ready to assist you but please be there with projects and once you know a project has received financing please be fast also with the implementation because at the end of 2026 everything has to be finalized and if any milestones and targets are not met then of course we risk we risk to lose money in the very end i think that will not happen to korea but we have to all work to make sure that that doesn't happen it is a unique instrument it is not foreseen that it is prolonged it is not foreseen that it continues forever it is not foreseen that it is repeated immediately because next generation EU in total is about 700 billion euros the european commission has to borrow lots of money on the markets to make these money available and the loans component the governments will pay back to the commission but the grants component is not paid back so we will have to find also ways for this to be paid back after 2028 in the european parliament the position of the parliament is to work through own resources to to make sure that this is being paid back what i want to say is the instrument is here it is here for now it will end in 2026 so let's make best use of it focus on implementation and also as we discussed before we power EU it is a new opportunity almost 200 million euros in grants for korea for investments energy we just gave the green light we just voted it in the european parliament two weeks ago so if you have any projects in the area of energy which were not covered by by the recovery and resilience facility a repower EU will be the place to to present them to discuss them with the government and to to include them we're leaving zagreb today as EPP group very confident i would like to congratulate you on everything that you have done so far and assure you that the EPP will be with you to support you also for the next stages and in order for all of us to be strong for the next stages a lunch is waiting for all of us in the restaurant once again thank you very much for your hospitality carlock oation colleagues thank you very much