Romanian authorities sent projects worth 629 million Euro to the European Commission for approval in December 2018, of which 571 million Euro are related to projects that got to Brussels in the last two weeks of 2018, according to Regional Development commissioner Corina Cretu.

Cretu says that she had warned Romanian authorities ever since the beginning of last year about the risk of losing 830 million Euro of the Regional Operational Programme, and that they had to submit projects to cover this amount by December 31, 2018, Business Review reads.

“Due to the intense efforts of the European Commission and the Romanian authorities, the risk of automatically losing the funds was avoided by identifying and finding solutions for the obstacles that had appeared in the implementation process,” Cretu wrote. “I want to note that all the measures proposed for accelerating EU funds absorption followed the implementation rules for structural and investment European funds, and supervised by the EC’s Legal Services.”

One of the measures taken, according to Cretu, was to change several operational programmes in order to direct funding from priorities that had low absorption (such as urban transport in small cities), towards areas that had a better absorption potential (such as healthcare and SMEs).