Portugal is in a very large group of countries that supports the €18 billion macro-financial aid package Commission President Ursula von Leyen recently said she would table to support Ukraine in 2023, Finance Minister Fernando Medina said in Brussels on Tuesday.
Medina participated in the Eurogroup and Ecofin meetings on Monday and Tuesday.
“In the meetings of these two days, we found a very broad convergence of European countries on the support package to Ukraine for 2023, amounting to €18 billion, which covers the financial needs of Ukraine for a year,” Medina told journalists after the two meetings on Tuesday.
However, the minister pointed to Hungary having expressed reservations to the package, but said he was hopeful these would soon be dropped as Hungary recently vowed to reform its judiciary in the hope the European Commission would finally unblock EU recovery funds worth €5.8 billion in grants.
“The Commission’s proposal is a strong proposal because it responds to Ukraine’s needs for a significant period of one year,” he said, adding that “it is also a very balanced proposal from the point of view of the burden that each member state will have to bear.”
“Portugal is in the very wide group of countries that supports this Commission proposal, and we hope that it can soon see the light of day,” he added.
The funding would be “based on taking advantage of European funding that is available as a guarantee so that the EU can contract debt to support Ukraine, and the costs of this debt will then be borne by the various member states over the coming years” according to a format that is yet to be defined, he explained.
The plans will be formally presented by the Commission on Wednesday, he said, warning, however, that Hungary has also expressed doubts regarding this proposal.
Budapest “has expressed its reservations regarding the approval of a common financing instrument, but this brings us to another debate, which has to do with Hungary’s own access to the financing of the Recovery and Resilience Plan”, as this is “the political framework where this reservation fits,” he said.
At a press conference that followed the Ecofin Council, Executive Vice-President Valdis Dombrovskis confirmed that the Commission would present the concrete proposal on Wednesday to provide Kyiv with €18 billion of macro-financial assistance in the form of highly concessional loans.
The aim is for the propopsal to be approved by the member states and the European Parliament later this year so that the first disbursement could take place as early as next January, Dombrovskis also said.
(André Campos | Lusa.pt)
Source: euractiv.com
