Malta will be spending €52 million in EU funds allocated to it on migration-related projects, with the EU Commission having approved that allocation this week.
The €52.3 million in funding will be extracted from a €2.25 billion pot that the EU allocated Malta in 2020 for its 2021-2017 funding round.
It is the first funding allocation from that round that the EU Commission has approved for Malta.
The €52.3 million will come from the EU’s Asylum, Migration and Integration Fund, or AMIL. AMIL is focused on strengthening the EU’s common European asylum system and helping member states integrate third-country nationals, repatriate failed asylum seekers and relocate those granted humanitarian protection to other countries within the EU.
Funding can also be used to improve infrastructure related to migration, such as reception centres.
Malta’s approved allocation of €52.3 million in EU funds was announced by the parliamentary secretariat for EU funds on Wednesday.
The statement did not provide any details about what that money will be used for, despite parliamentary secretary Chris Bonett saying that Malta had to present “clear ideas about where and how we will be spending this fund”.
Instead, the statement said that the money would be used to “provide support for our country to continue to tackle the challenge of irregular migration.”
The secretariat added that it expects to receive EU Commission approval for several other funding allocations in the coming weeks, effectively giving the government the green light to start investing in such projects.
That will come as a relief to Prime Minister Robert Abela and his executive, given a Finance Ministry decision to cancel a raft of domestically-financed infrastructural projects, in a bid to rein in spending and use that money to bankroll an energy subsidy instead.
In its Wednesday statement, the EU Funds secretariat said that officials have been in regular discussions with the EU Commission about how to allocate Malta’s 2021-2027 funding allocation ever since the €2.25 billion package was announced by Prime Minister Robert Abela.
That allocation is significantly larger than the previous one, which totalled €1.1 billion, with EU funding to member states over the coming years having been boosted by the inclusion of an additional COVID-19 stimulus package.
Malta’s €2.25 billion allocation was trimmed by €60 million earlier this year, with Brussels recalculating the figure to take into account the country’s rapid economic growth.