The chairman of the Monitoring Commission for the Recovery and Resilience Plan (PRR), Pedro Dominguinhos, believes that Portugal should receive a new “check” from the PRR in November, for achieving a set of milestones and goals that had been agreed with the Commission European.

“So far, we have an advance, the first request for payment and it is subject to the second request for payment and I am tempted that, during the month of November, there will be a response from the European Commission. And in the first quarter of 2003, we will submit a new refund request”, he said, in an interview with Negócios and Antena 1.

Pedro Dominguinhos was referring to the second request for payment, which was delivered by Portugal to Brussels at the end of September. This new disbursement request has a total value of 1.8 billion euros (1.7 billion euros in grants and 109 million euros in loans) and is due to the fulfillment of 20 milestones and targets.

The forecast is based on the fact that the European Commission has two months to assess requests for disbursement of new funds from the PRR, after the fulfillment of a set of milestones and targets agreed with the different Member States.

The first disbursement of the PRR, in the amount of 1.16 billion was approved in March by the European Commission and was paid in May. Before that, Portugal had already benefited from a pre-financing in August, in the amount of 2.2 billion.