The payment request number 4 under the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR) is progressing and there is confidence it will be completed in time and submitted by 15 December, Minister of Investment and European Projects Dragos Pislaru said on Tuesday.

„The payment request number 4 is advancing, most of the milestones have already been prepared, sent to the Commission, we have also received feedback from the Commission and we are now looking at any additional observations that need to be addressed. We do not send things just for the sake of sending them, we want confirmation that we are on the same page as the European Commission on all the targets and milestones, the 62 we have in the 4th payment request. I repeat: it is worth 2.62 billion euro,” Dragos Paslaru told a press conference at the Victoria Palace.

He explained that, at the moment, there is a certain delay compared with the original deadline.

„Initially we planned or had in mind to prepare the documents by the end of November. Because of the challenge to the CCR [the Constitutional Court of Romania] regarding the fiscal package, we will probably have to wait. The CCR deadline is on 10 December and our working deadline for submitting the 4th payment request is 15 December. Until then, we have only a few matters left to resolve, which in terms of complexity are not very complicated. We have just one piece of legislation to adopt, namely a government decision on the reorganisation of Romsilva, which follows the clarification of the legislation through the recently adopted OUG [Emergency Ordinance of the Government]. The rest are mainly operational aspects. Therefore, we are confident that we will complete the preparation of payment request 4 in due time and submit it by 15 December. Basically, we have already begun uploading all the evidence into the Phoenix system, the communication system with the Commission. We also have very good news, we have obtained the audit of the system and passed successfully,” Pislaru explained. AGERPRES