Kostis Hatzidakis attended today's ECOFIN, which approved executive decisions regarding changes to the Recovery Fund of Greece, Finland, Germany, Poland, and Cyprus.

Regarding the implementation of the Recovery Fund, it was recorded that Greece has already received €14.9 billion (€7.6 billion in grants and €7.3 billion in loans), consistently ranking among the first in the EU in terms of absorption. Also in the coming months, the EU is expected to disburse €3.3 billion of the 4th payment request (€998.6 million in grants and €2.3 billion in loans). Therefore, the total liquidity from Recovery Fund resources will amount to €18.2 billion, more than half of the total available budget.

The ECOFIN also adopted the country-specific recommendations and conclusions on the in-depth reviews of 2024, carried out in the context of the European Semester. It is worth mentioning that based on the latest spring forecasts of the European Commission, public debt in the EU is still almost 4 percentage points above its pre-pandemic level (from 77.8 in 2019 to 81.7 in 2023), while in Greece it has decreased from 180.6% in 2019 to 161.9% in 2023, i.e., by 18.7 percentage points.