«The Pnrr, as shown by the studies carried out, also had a very important effect on the gross domestic product of Sicily». This was said by the Minister for European Affairs, PNRR and Cohesion Policies, Tommaso Foti, meeting journalists in the former Magazzini Generali – former Casa del Portuale area in Messina with the centre-right candidate Marcello Scurria. «It is a region – said the minister – like all the other southern regions, which in the last three years has exceeded the gross domestic product of the average of the northern and central regions, therefore it means that the impact has been there and that it also works in relation to how the funds were used and the quantity of funds used. For the south we had envisaged a territorialisation equal to 40% of the total funding of the Pnrr, this percentage was perfectly maintained”.
For Foti, «it is clear that there are cities that are more advanced with the Pnrr and cities that are less so, moreover it becomes difficult to carry out monitoring at this moment because the reporting of expenses is not all done in the same way, so there are realities that are far behind but on the last day they say that they will report next week and the following week they will return to the average. You have to wait until August 31st to see the results. However, my invitation is to speed up.”
«The money from the Pnrr doesn’t rain from the sky: there are 122 billion – if we take it all – which are in debt, and 72 billion in non-repayable funds, but in reality it is a roundabout game because we are net contributors in Europe, so it’s just that once the Pnrr is over there is another Pnrr. We undoubtedly think – he added – that, having a certain number of interventions, which are decidedly higher than those we have targeted at a European level, there may be a certain margin for recovery, but we are not able to say today exactly how the individual administrations will close or how the individual projects will close. My hope is that if everyone does a significant part and therefore 95% of their duty, we will equip ourselves for 5%.
Foti continued: «I think that the administrations, especially the municipal ones, should not think about the next day but start thinking about the next decade, because if we start planning and looking forward we will probably stop some bleeding. The phenomenon of depopulation of internal areas does not only concern the mountainous areas of the north, it heavily affects the south and Sicily, therefore evaluations and perspectives are needed in the medium term to reverse the trend because the right to remain must also be combined with the possibility that people then have a concrete possibility of staying”.