We welcomed the focus of the Presidency's programme on supporting competitiveness and on the implementation of the new economic governance framework. Both will be challenging in the coming months.
What is very important for the Commission and was also reiterated by all intervening Ministers is that we will continue to have support for Ukraine very high on our agenda, at the top of our priorities, and this support will last for as long as it takes.
On the RRF implementation, we have now reached 241 billion in disbursements, with 16 payment requests in the pipeline. We expect to reach the 300 billion mark by the end of the year.
So good progress but of course it's also clear that we need to strengthen our activity with Member States to have a good implementation of the plans in the coming months and where needed we have to accelerate.
On Ukraine, we know that the country's financing needs remain challenging. We expect the IMF in September to establish the amount of the financing gap. We are working hard with our Ukraine Facility. And now the Commission is working on the EU part of this G7 agreement for 50 billion dollars in loans, to operationalise this agreement. As you know these loans will be backed by the windfall profits on Russian immobilised assets. And this will be one of the main subjects of next week's meeting at the G7 Finance Ministers' Meeting next week during the G20 meeting in Rio de Janeiro.
We are working on a proposal which we aim to be able to present very soon, and I am encouraged by the widespread – I would say unanimous – support from Ministers for an adoption of this proposal as soon as possible.
On the European Semester and fiscal rules, we approved the elements of our European Semester on the country-specific recommendations and the macro-economic imbalance procedure, and we had a good discussion on the next steps.
Last week, we followed up on our finding that excessive deficit procedures were warranted for 7 Member States. The Commission 4 proposed to the Council decisions establishing the existence of an excessive deficit in those seven Member States.
As we explained when we presented the Semester Package, the transition to the new fiscal rules required this year a different timing of the steps related to the Excessive Deficit Procedures. That is why the next step on the proposal for an EDP recommendation will arrive in autumn. This is to have consistency between the EDP corrective path recommendation and the national medium-term plans that we expect Member States to submit in autumn – September 20, maximum 15 October – and there was widespread support for this exceptional approach to split the two.
Finally, a word on our "Convergence Report".
Despite the shocks of the past few years, the euro remains strong, enjoys high levels of support in Member States not part of the euro area and continues to underpin our economic and monetary integration.
Bulgaria is the only country that fulfils all but one criterion – on price stability – and where national legislation can be considered to be compatible with the rules of the Economic and Monetary Union.
