France has called on the EU to overcome “blockages” to ensure faster disbursement of its €750bn recovery fund to member states, and said the coronavirus pandemic will require re-evaluating eurozone fiscal constraints, reports the Financial Times.
“I see there are blockages and that all this is too slow, that we need to accelerate and that if we want to emerge from the economic crisis in the best conditions, the European money must arrive as quickly as possible,” Bruno Le Maire, French finance minister, told the Financial Times in an interview on Tuesday.
Referring to last year’s Franco-German negotiations that led to the EU’s historic decision to raise common debt to disburse as grants to member states whose economies have been hammered by the pandemic, he added: “We didn’t expend all that political capital only for the plan to be delayed for technocratic reasons . . . It’s too slow and it’s too complicated. We must accelerate.”
The EU’s 27 members need first to detail how they plan to use the grants and loans by the end of April. Once those plans are approved by the European Commission, disbursements are expected to begin in the second half of the year.