“I think the realistic deadline is the one Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki spoke about, that is, the third-fourth quarter of this year, if everything goes according to plan,” the Minister for European Union Affairs Szymon Szynkowski vel Sęk said in a response to a question on when the funds from the National Reconstruction Plan (KPO) will arrive.
Minister Szynkowski vel Sęk reported that Poland had met almost all the ‘milestones’.
To the suggestion that the next ‘milestone’ needed for the disbursement of funds from the National Reconstruction Plan is the so-called Windmill Act, which the Sejm will deal with at its forthcoming session, and that it is not a foregone conclusion when the government will submit the application to the European Commission, the minister replied that “the timing of the application will ultimately be decided by Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki”. ‘We have been saying for many weeks that we will submit the application at the moment when we are convinced that the conditions exist for its smooth procedure and positive assessment”, said Szynkowski vel Sęk.
On Sunday, referring to the suggestion that a debate on the KPO is needed, the EU minister stressed that “a debate on the KPO is possible, but it would be a post factum debate”. ‘We have adopted with other EU countries the mechanism of the European Reconstruction Plan, of which the KPO is a part, this is not a decision that is before us, because it has already been taken”, said EU Affairs Minister Szymon Szynkowski vel Sęk.
To the remark that the KPO is in fact a disguised, expensive loan, Szynkowski vel Sęk countered that only one piece of information is correct in this statement, that it is indeed a kind of long-term loan. He pointed out that it is not disguised and certainly not expensive.
“We will repay just over half of what we borrow in the capital layer”, he added. We will borrow 22.5 billion euros in terms of the grant part and repay between 13 and 15 billion. This shows that these are very favourable conditions”, he said.
Adrian Andrzejewski