ATHENS, Feb 27 (Reuters) – Greece will propose the creation of a European Union Energy Solidarity Fund to ease the impact of the energy crisis on households, businesses and consumers, its minister for finance said on Sunday. Energy, before the meeting of European ministers on Monday. Read more
“The EU should take decisive collective action to tackle the energy crisis. Dealing with the problem on an individual basis is not a sustainable path,” Energy Minister Kostas Skrekas said in a letter to the authorities. European ministers and commissioners.
A prolonged crisis in Ukraine will have significant costs for all EU economies, industries and consumers, inevitably leading to serious distortions in the single market, he said.
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The EU’s proposed Energy Crisis Solidarity Facility (ECSF) would provide temporary assistance to Member States to help repair the immediate damage caused by soaring energy prices, thereby limiting the impact on national budgets.
Under the plan, EU member states would get low-interest loans from the ECSF to finance the costs of state intervention to mitigate the impact of the price crisis. energy, he said.
Each EU member state would receive funding from the ECSF up to a quota, with loans exempt from the government’s fiscal targets for deficits and public debt.
The loans would be repaid over a period of 12 to 15 years from future income, including special levies applied to energy consumption.
“The continuous rise in energy prices over the past year (…) had already reached a crisis point before the illegal Russian invasion of Ukraine. Now it risks spiraling completely out of control unless we were not taking immediate and decisive action,” he said.
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Reporting by George Georgiopoulos; Editing by Alison Williams
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