Committee on Budgetary Control Ordinary meeting ICM
24 June 2026
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CONT European Parliament
Follow its sittings16:36 - 19:48
Speaker 2
So good afternoon everyone. A warm welcome to all our guests to the European Parliament. Bienvenue au Parlement européen. Benvenuti. It's a pleasure that you have taken the time this afternoon to discuss with us and the representatives of the European Court of Auditors, the European Anti-Fraud Office and the European Commission.
I think they are there already. They are. Very good. A warm welcome also to you to discuss here in that round on our interparliamentary committee meeting on Recovery and Resilience Facility oversight and the future outlook concerning the next multiannual financial framework. I would like to warmly thank the 24 members and the 15 parliamentary chambers representing 12 countries who have traveled from across the European Union to join us today here in the European Parliament.
Your participation reflects the importance of close cooperation between the European Parliament and national parliaments in ensuring effective oversight over EU funds. Parliamentary scrutiny both at European and national level is essential to ensure that EU resources are managed effectively, transparently and deliver on the objectives for which we have established them. Interparliamentary exchanges can help us, exchanges like today, to provide a valuable opportunity to share experiences, discuss the challenges encountered and draw lessons to strengthen our budgetary control. And therefore I'm pleased to start our first session on Recovery and Resilience Facility oversight. The RRF is an unprecedented instrument in terms of scale, ambition and delivery model that introduced a stronger performance-based approach to EU funding, especially after the difficult months and years in COVID.
As it moves toward completion and discussions on the next annual financial framework, this is a timely moment to assess the effectiveness of this tool and the reasons to check it in practice, consider both its achievement and shortcomings and reflect on how these lessons can inform future EU budgetary instruments. I'm therefore very pleased that we have speakers here from member states that help us to share and to understand better their concerns and to share their personal experiences. And our first speaker announced is Mr. Stefan-Radu Oprea. He's a member of the Committee on Budget, Finance. Ah, he's, he had to cancel, Romanian Senate had to cancel and therefore he's replaced by Mr. Franz Fayot.
He's the chair of the Committee on Budget Control of the Chamber of Deputies of Luxembourg and has kindly agreed to address us today and to replace Mr. Oprea. Monsieur Fayot, merci beaucoup.
And we will give the floor also to Mr. Daniel Freund, who is a member of our committee here in the European Parliament. And like that, we have our first two speakers. Therefore, I would like to give you the floor, Mr. Fayot, over to you.
19:48 - 23:29
Speaker 1
Thank you very much, Chair, and thank you for having me. It's a shorter way for me than the colleague from Romania, so very happy to be here. Let me share maybe a few thoughts from both the perspective of government and also from the perspective of parliament, because when the Recovery and Resilience Plan was first put together, I was in government, and so I was part of that effort in structuring the Luxembourgish Recovery and Resilience Plan. You are talking to someone from a country that had a relatively small envelope of 83 million, so Luxembourg had the smallest envelope at the time of all member countries. It was later on with REPowerEU increased to 241 million with a big focus on the energy transition.
But when we were first faced with the challenge of putting it together, it was actually the challenge to find relevant projects to put into the plan and also impactful projects that fit the criteria of NextGenEU in a very short timeframe during also managing the pandemic back in 2021. So just to say that there was not a lot of time for strategic planning. It was more a matter to find projects that were already in the pipeline of the government, which had objectives at the time that were aligned with the European objectives of the twin transition, digital and green. But that was really the big focus at the time. The projects we identified were in the field of energy transition, but also protecting biodiversity, the future skills rollout, and also digital capacity with quantum computing, as well as governance, which was about enforcing the AML capacities for our financial sector.
Now, second point from a perspective of a parliamentarian now, because since 2023, I am member of parliament in the opposition. There was a switch in government in Luxembourg in 2023. And I have to say that the role of parliament in Luxembourg, both in conceiving the RRF but also in scrutinizing it, is quite limited. Parliament had no role in the when it was put together. And on reporting and monitoring, this happens through the National Medium-Term Fiscal-Structural Plan, which has replaced the European Semester exercise with the European Stability and Growth Pact.
So it's actually the parliament is informed, is also involved in the context of these discussions, but there is quite a limited role, also partly due partly to the fact that the objectives are not always clear and also very quantified. Let me finish with a thought on the present context and also looking at it from the perspective of a very, very small European member state. It has to be said in hindsight that despite its flaws, the Recovery and Resilience Plans had the big merits of being a collective effort, thinking about a collective response to the pandemic on how to recover.