A request for seaplanes needed to fight forest fires is red-flagged because it could harm the environment. Companies seeking aid after being hammered by COVID are asked to show proof of a healthy balance sheet in recent years.
They are among the discordant calls made by Spanish and EU bureaucrats as Spain's drive to hand out 77 billion euros in grants from EU pandemic recovery funds becomes mired in complexity, according to interviews with business associations, government officials, companies and consultants.
Only 16.5% of companies have applied for grants and 7% have been accepted, a Bank of Spain survey of 6,000 businesses in February found. Meanwhile, only about 9 billion euros have actually reached the businesses awarded funds, according to calculations by the Esade Centre for Economic Policy, a Madrid-based think-tank that tracks the pandemic recovery cash.
New Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has blamed her predecessors Mario Draghi and Giuseppe Conte for the delays. Then there's another system called Coffee to audit applications and keep track of where the money is, often requiring significant amounts of paperwork from companies. Still, the program has only disbursed about a third of budgeted funds for the digital project, according to data compiled by CEOE, Spain's main employers association.
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