On Monday, Katarzyna Pełczyńska-Nałęcz, the funds and regional policy minister, told a press conference that “
We are trying to... make up for delays in the grant part of the KPO, and as for loans, we are looking at those profitable ones.”
“We will not invest 100 percent, but we strive to make use of as much as possible, especially from grants,” she said.
Poland is set to receive EUR 25.3 billion in grants and EUR 34.5 billion in loans from EU coffers as part of its KPO which details how the money will be spent. Of this, as part of the first payment request, Warsaw received EUR 6.3 billion on Monday.
Poland wants to submit two more applications for the payment of up to EUR 10 billion after the KPO revision has been processed in Brussels, that is in late August or early September, Pelczynska-Nalecz added.
This money should be paid by the end of this year, she said.
The EU aid must be spent by the end of 2026 but many investment projects in the KPO have not even been started and may not be implemented in time, which can result in them not being financed with the recovery funds.
Why has Poland not received the funds earlier?
Under the previous socially conservative Law and Justice (PiS) government, in office until December 2023,
the billions of euros in recovery funding were frozen owing to EU concerns about judicial independence and media freedom.
Amid the dispute, Poland did not apply for an advance payment, which would have been independent of the rule-of-law criteria.
In early March, Poland’s deputy justice minister called for an investigation into the former Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki and his cabinet’s ministers for the loss.
A former deputy foreign minister called these accusations “deceitful on one hand and inept on the other,” and accused Ursula von der Leyen, the President of the European Commission, of withholding the payment, hoping for the political wind in Poland to shift.
The European Commission (EC), the EU’s executive arm, found that Poland had
met the so-called milestones required for the release of funds, including the independence of the judiciary in late February.
In April, a government Accountability Team notified the Warsaw District Prosecutor’s Office of the
possible crime by the former Prime Minister as well as the Justice Minister in his cabinet, Zbigniew Ziobro, for “acting to the detriment of the public interest, by failing to fulfill their duties by failing to submit an application to the European Commission for the disbursement of KPO funds” in 2022 and 2023 by delaying the necessary reforms of the judiciary.
