Salitros: Cancelled Call Had Both High-quality and Highly Suspect Projects

Kosice/Bratislava, 22 July (TASR) – The recently cancelled call for digital transformation projects, worth approximately €50 million, to be funded under the Recovery and Resilience Plan, included both high-quality and highly suspect projects, according to Investment, Regional Development and Informatisation Deputy Minister Radomir Salitros. Salitros, who is temporarily standing in for Minister Samuel Migal (Independent), who has undergone cardiac surgery, made the statement in Kosice on Tuesday. He also noted that the ministry has a back-up plan in place. "I must say that among the projects submitted under the €50-million call, there were some of high quality. However, there were also a few very suspect ones. We decided that it was better to halt the call," he explained. "We're doing everything we can to avoid returning the funds. We have a back-up plan prepared. One option is to launch a new call, but other alternatives are also being considered," he added. On 17 July, the ministry announced that it was cancelling a call aimed at supporting research and development in the area of Slovakia's digital transformation. The reason given was serious implementation risks stemming from the original set-up that could have led to critical failures and jeopardised the use of funds from the Slovak Recovery and Resilience Plan. "More than half of the 247 submitted applications failed to meet even the basic conditions for funding or were assessed as low-quality. Expert evaluation and subsequent verification of state aid criteria revealed systematic issues, such as incorrect classification of company size and especially errors in categorising research activities. Furthermore, it became apparent that even foreign expert evaluators had difficulties navigating the specifics of the local environment, which resulted in inappropriate decisions," the ministry stated last week. mf/df