A decision on the national recovery and resilience plans of Croatia, Cyprus, Lithuania and Slovenia has been formally adopted and now those countries can sign financing agreements with the European Commission, the Council of the EU said on Wednesday.

The decision was made by written procedure that was finalised on Wednesday.

EU finance ministers on Monday confirmed the positive assessments of national recovery and resilience plans for the four member states and initiated written procedure for their approval.

Since no decisions can be made at informal video meetings, written procedure was launched to formally approve the four countries’ national recovery and resilience plans. The procedure was completed on Wednesday with the adoption of a formal decision.

On 8 July, the European Commission gave the green light to Croatia’s national recovery and resilience plan, worth €6.3 billion, and forwarded it to the Council for adoption.

Croatia has been allocated €6.3 billion in grants and 3.6 billion in favourable loans under the Recovery and Resilience Facility, the central element of the Next Generation EU recovery plan. It has been decided that Croatia will for now use only grants and that it may ask for loans at a later date. The €6.3 billion amounts to 11.6 percent of Croatia’s 2019 GDP.

After the decision on approval of the recovery plan becomes official, Croatia will sign a financing agreement with the Commission and within two months of its signing it will receive an advance of 13 percent of the allocation, or €819 million. It is not yet known whether this amount will be disbursed in one or more tranches.