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

Excellent news for four more member states – Croatia, Cyprus, Lithuania, and Slovenia. We have confirmed the positive assessments of the national plans of these four countries, Slovenian Finance Minister Andrej Sircelj said after an informal meeting of the Finance and Economic Council.

Since no decisions can be made at informal video meetings, written procedure was launched after the meeting to formally approve the national recovery and resilience plans of the four countries. The procedure is expected to be completed within the next few days.

On July 8, the 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.

About ten days ago, EU finance ministers approved the initial batch of 12 national recovery and resilience plans (for Portugal, Spain, Greece, Denmark, Luxembourg, Austria, Slovakia, Latvia, Germany, Italy, Belgium and France), which means that a total of 16 national plans will have been approved before the summer recess starts in August.