After having proposed to the Council on 24 August a package of support totalling €81.4 billion for 15 countries, indicating at the time that it was still considering a formal request from the Portuguese authorities, on 25 August the EU executive proposed “to include Portugal and make a total of €87.3 billion of financial support from ‘SURE’ to the 16 member states available.
“Following approval of these proposals by the Council, the financial support will take the form of EU loans to Portugal on favourable terms. These loans will help Portugal to cope with sudden increases in public spending aimed at preserving jobs. Specifically, they will help Portugal to cover the costs directly related to the financing of its national working time reduction scheme,” the EU executive said in a statement.
SURE is one of the three ‘safety nets’ of the emergency response package to the crisis caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, budgeted at a total of €540 billion, agreed by eurozone and EU finance ministers and approved at a European Council on 23 April.
This scheme to preserve jobs will be operational until 31 December 2022, but may be extended for a further six months “if the serious economic disruption caused by the outbreak of Covid-19 persists,” the Council announced at the time.
This is bad news for us Portuguese! Our government is very efficient at wasting tax payers monies, the last thing we need is more money to be wasted but we still need to repay it! We need a new political party in Portugal that is extreme right wing but not racist and our aim is to shrink government as much as possible and to have a big private sector! Government run projects is just a really bad idea always! We can be patriotic and nationalistic but without thinking we are superior to anybody else! This is exactly what we need to do!
By Anna from Madeira on 28 Aug 2020, 11:13
Anna it is a bad idea let the government run private sector
By John couto from USA on 28 Aug 2020, 22:56
John Couto - I said the opposite, our country should be run a bit more like Singapore, with very little government interference! Big governments create a lot of corruption, incompetence and inefficiency! De já vu!
By Anna from Madeira on 01 Sep 2020, 17:39