Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis met with Executive Vice-President for Cohesion and Reforms Raffaele Fitto on Thursday afternoon at the Maximos Mansion.
According to reports, during the meeting, the high absorption and utilisation of European funds by Greece was highlighted.
There was also a first exchange of views on the proposals presented by the European Commission for the next 7-year budget of the European Union and the financial programs it will contain.
At the beginning of their meeting, Kyriakos Mitsotakis and Raffaele Fitto had the following dialogue:
Kyriakos Mitsotakis: Welcome, first of all, and congratulations. So happy that you’re visiting us. You have a very, very important portfolio, and we have lots to discuss about the future of European funding, including cohesion.
We know that the Greek economy has made significant progress over the past years and, of course, a big part of our success has been our ability to absorb European funds -structural funds, but also very good progress with the RRF.
We feel that European funding is integral in helping us transform our economy, making it more competitive. I stress competitiveness because it is the big issue that the new Commission will address.
I’m very interested to hear your ideas and your thoughts and I’m really looking forward to a very productive cooperation. Again, congratulations on the important job that you have assumed.
Raffaele Fitto: Thank you, Prime Minister. For me, it’s a great pleasure to be here. I said before that this is one of my first missions because I believe that it’s important to meet the principal member states that have a great interest about Cohesion policy. My portfolio is Cohesion, but one point is that for the first time, Cohesion is under one Executive Vice- President. This is important.
And the second point, I think that is another good opportunity is that in this new governance of the European Commission, we have the co-ordination of different other portfolios and under Cohesion. Under these Executive Vice-Presidents, we have the co-ordination about agriculture, tourism, transport, blue economy, and the fisheries. I think that this is for your country a picture of the opportunity of the development.
I think that it is very important to speak about the priorities that we have in this moment. This is my mission. An important objective is to understand the real situation. Here, the numbers of your government are very positive for the expenditure.
Βut we have in the current programmes of the Cohesion policy some problems. I think that it’s possible now to open a debate with the member states to verify if it’s possible to change using the midterm review, the current programme.