The PP has opened a new front of criticism of the Government for the sovereign fund called España Crece. According to the main opposition party, it has been designed with the aim of making up for the Executive’s inability to manage European funds and save part of the recovery plan loans that it has renounced. It is “smoke” and “propaganda,” said this Thursday in a meeting with the media the deputy economic secretary of the party, Alberto Nadal, who has warned that it will generate more debt, and has assured that, if the PP comes to govern, “it will have to be resized.”
On January 15, Pedro Sánchez announced the creation of España Crece, the country’s first sovereign fund directed, according to the leader of the Executive, to continue the investment drive at the end of the European recovery mechanism, which ends this year. The instrument will be managed by the Official Credit Institute (ICO), which will receive an injection of 10,500 million from the loans left over from the recovery plan and which will serve to expand its capitalization. This additional cushion, according to the Executive’s calculations, will increase the direct investment capacity of the public organization and, in total, will give it the potential to mobilize some 120,000 million with contributions from investors. Numbers that, according to Nadal, are incredible.
“For a start, [España crece] It is not a sovereign fund. A sovereign fund is what countries that sell raw materials have,” Nadal concluded. “What it is about is that the Government had initially allocated 83,000 million euros of European funds in the form of loans, of the 160,000 million that had been granted to Spain, and has been unable to execute them,” he said, in reference to the Executive’s decision to renounce two-thirds of the credits that had been pre-granted from the recovery mechanism. “The Government “He set up a propaganda operation saying that he is continuing the investment when he has not executed anything.”
Member States have until the end of August to implement the reforms and investments committed to in their national recovery plans, which must be certified before the end of the year. The Executive, in serious difficulties for Congress to approve some of the measures committed in exchange for the release of funds, announced that it would renounce 75% of the recovery fund credits and focus on non-refundable aid. He justified his decision by claiming that the interest rates offered by the EU are no longer as favorable as when the mechanism was designed, and that now Spain, with an economy that is growing strongly, has access to equally advantageous financing conditions.
Nadal has insisted that the loans would have had to be requested two or three years ago, when the European Central Bank began to raise interest rates to fight inflation and SMEs were “suffocated.” “He missed the rice [al Gobierno]”, he stated, due to his inability to implement the aid. The economic deputy secretary of the PP has presented a compilation of how the amounts of the European loans have been reduced or cancelled, one by one, initially planned, an operation carried out through the addendum. “The minister likes to talk about a simplification agenda, but it is a reduction of ambition,” he concluded.
The PP politician has called the management of European funds an “absolute failure” and has insisted that the purpose of España Crece is that the “accounts [ejecución] don’t turn out so horrible.” “It is a desperate move by the Government to try to prevent the figure from being higher than it already is,” he said. “Basically, it is nothing more than smoke, propaganda to try to save 10,000 million of the loans that Brussels gave us, not having to return them and create a financial instrument at the disposal of the Government that will not have any impact on the Spanish economy, its growth and productivity.”
