Our country is on the 24th place of the 28 member states of the European Union in the pace of absorption of EU funds from the old programming period. Today Bulgaria needs to absorb 1.665 billion euro or will lose them.

As of August 31st 2015 the level of absorption is at 85.10%.

Only one of the Bulgarian EU programs for the period 2007-2013 has passed the border of 90 percent by August 31st and this is Operational Program "Development of Human Resources", which leads in the rankings with 95% or 980 million euro received from the European Commission. Following are Operational Program "Competitiveness" with 86.26%, Operational Program "Administrative Capacity" with 84.71% and Operational Program "Technical Assistance" with 84.19%. Two programs are with a utilization rate of over 70 percent - Operational Program "Transport" with 78.35% and Operational Program "Regional Development" with 72.34%.

By the end of August, the European Commission has recognized for correctly absorbed 65% of the funds under Operational Program "Environment".

Little more than 100 days remain before the end of the programming period and the level of absorption of agricultural and fishing funds is 82%. We risk losing 178 million euro from the Rural Development Program.

From our membership in the EU (01 January 2007) until now 9.5 billion euro has been paid off from the EU funds, of which 7.3 billion euro have been recovered from Brussels.

Source: manager.bg