Transparency at France’s discount on European recovery plan money

Who benefits from the approximately 700 billion euros of the European recovery plan? The twenty-seven member states which benefit from these funds released after the Covid-19 pandemic are forced to answer this question, by publishing, from 2023, the list of the first hundred recipients of their subsidies. France published this data for the first time in December, but the expected transparency was not there.

The rule governing the payment of European credits, which represent 40 billion euros for France, is clear: each country must publish twice a year “data on the hundred final recipients who receive the highest amount of funding”whether it is an association, a company or even an individual.

This measure, imposed by the European Parliament, aims for greater transparency regarding the use of funds by member states. But the list that France has just published is far from meeting this ambition: it contains almost exclusively the names of the major State operators responsible for distributing funds. The first of them, the Services and Payment Agency, thus appears in first position, with 15.1 billion euros in subsidies, while the public establishment is only a transmission belt, not a final beneficiary of the funds.

“It’s useless to have this kind of information. The spirit of the measure has not been respected”, deplores Kévin Gernier, advocacy officer for the NGO Transparency International France. The publication of this register was initially intended to prevent the risks of corruption and conflicts of interest, and more broadly to allow citizens to find out about the use of public money. The opening of data on European agricultural subsidies, for example, made it possible to identify numerous abuses in this area.

Contacted, the Ministry of the Economy indicates that it used the State’s financial software, Chorus, to establish this list “rapidly and at an aggregate level” without further details on the methodology used.

Companies absent from the listing despite tens of millions of euros in subsidies

The list published by the government is also incomplete, according to the cross-checks carried out by The world with documents obtained in May as part of requests for access to administrative documents. For example, Société Générale benefited from more than 9.8 million euros in aid to employers of apprentices between 2020 and 2021. A sum which, alone, would place the group in 88^e place on the list of one hundred beneficiaries published by the government, even though he is absent from it.

Likewise, the Environment and Energy Management Agency (Ademe) appears to be one of the first beneficiaries of the recovery plan (538 million euros). But its credits are ultimately intended for companies which should have appeared in the government list. The company Dephy Corsica, which received, according to our information, 25.5 million euros from Ademe to finance two electrification projects for the ports of Ajaccio and Bastia, could have appeared in 36^e place on the list of beneficiaries of the French plan.

This is also the case for Renault, which benefited from 41.6 million euros in purchases from the State as part of the greening of its automobile fleet in 2021, and an additional 170 million euros through bonuses. ecological (also financed by the recovery plan) in 2020.

Among the poor European students when it comes to transparency

Contacted by The worldthe ministry argues that thes “other member states have used the same methodology as France” and cites the case of Italy and the Netherlands, whose main beneficiaries are municipalities and regions, or even of Germany, where ministries occupy twenty of the first hundred places.

In detail published by Germany include, for example, grants awarded to BioNTech (375 million euros) and CureVac (196 million) as part of programs to accelerate research on vaccines against Covid-19.

In Italy, the listing directly shows the credits granted to E-distribuzione, a subsidiary of Enel, responsible for electricity distribution, for the strengthening of its network (3.5 billion euros), as well as to the Open Fiber operator (1.8 billion).

On arrival, France is positioned among the lowest bidders in terms of transparency on the European recovery plan. Only Spain and Luxembourg are doing worse: the two countries have still not published their data, two weeks before the end of the year.