Payment of the EU grants from the 2007-2014 fiscal cycle will be completed by mid-October, Deputy State Secretary for Development Policy Communication of the Prime Minister’s Office Nándor Csepreghy said on the morning programme of the public service television news channel M1 on Thursday.

He added: any payments to be made by the Government thereafter will no longer be financed by the European Commission but will represent the excess undertakings of the Hungarian central budget which were made in order to reach a 100 per cent absorption rate.

The Deputy State Secretary said that there may be a number of projects from among the some 70 thousand developments launched during the previous EU fiscal cycle which may fall through for one reason or another. If the Government had only contracted for the funds received from Brussels, it would not have been possible to absorb the total available grants, Mr Csepreghy explained.

From among the 70 thousand awarded developments, some 5,000 are not yet fully closed. Given that these are post-financed projects, the Government will pay the awarded grants to the applicants after the closing of the projects, and the Government will be reimbursed by the European Union thereafter, he said.

Up to the end of this year, calls for proposals worth approximately HUF 2,700 billion will be launched to the debit of the allocation of HUF 12,000 billion which will be available during the EU fiscal cycle between 2014-2020, the Deputy State Secretary said.

(Prime Minister's Office/MTI)