Croatia will be able to use up about €684 million of funding from the European Solidarity Fund earmarked to assist its quake relief efforts until June 2023, Prime Minister, Andrej Plenkovic, said on Thursday. This represents a 12-month extension, as currently the funds had to be spent by June 2022, 18 months after they were made available.

Plenkovic tweeted the announcement after meeting with the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, in Brussels.

The funds were approved to help Croatia fix the damage caused by the March 2020 wake which hit Zagreb and the later December 2020 quake which hit Banija, an area in central Croatia around the town of Petrinja. The assistance, in the form of grants, was approved in two packages, totaling €684 million and €319 million respectively.

“Glad to meet Andrej Plenkovic today. We discussed reconstruction work supported by the EU after the Zagreb and Petrinja earthquakes. Given the exceptional circumstances, the Commission will look favorably at the request to align deadlines for absorption of EUSF funds to June 2023,” Von der Leyen tweeted.

The first €684 million grant, approved in January 2021 to help with the aftermath of the Zagreb quake, had to be used up by June 2022, when the 18-month deadline was set to expire. However, in spite of signing more than 300 contracts related to disaster relief and reconstruction, local media reported that Plenkovic’s government only managed to pay out around 4 percent of the money to date.

Because of the inability to use up funds and speed up the recovery, Plenkovic was becoming increasingly slammed by local media and opposition politicians, as rules of the EU Solidarity Fund do not envision any possibility of extending the deadline.

“We appreciate that the Commission has taken into account the specific situation Croatia was faced with after the two devastating earthquakes that struck this area while we were simultaneously dealing with the force majeure of the Covid-19 pandemic,” Plenkovic tweeted.