Caretaker Deputy Prime Minister in charge of EU funds Iliyana Tsanova. Photo BGNES
The European Commission will resume payments to Bulgaria under Operational Programme (OP) Environment within two weeks, a senior government official has said.
According to caretaker Deputy Prime Minister in charge of EU funds Iliyana Tsanova the news was communicated by Regional Policy CommissionerJohannes Hahn, capital.bg reported on Wednesday.
The European Commission froze over EUR 900M in EU funding under Environment programme in November 2013 due to flawed public procurement procedures. In June 2014 the European Union Executive suspended about BGN 640M in payments under two axes of Regional Development programme .
The previous government that resigned in July paid out about BGN 170M under Environment programme to make up for blocked EU funds.
The caretaker cabinet that took office in August endorsed the allocation of a total of BGN 750M from the government budget to prevent stalling of projects under Environment and Regional Development programmes already approved by the Commission. According to Tsanova, so far about BGN 450M of the total has been disbursed.