300m euro Phare funding

The head of the European Commission Delegation in Bucharest Jonathan Scheele and the new European Integration minister Alexandru Farcas on Tuesday signed three memorandums for financing covered by the PHARE 2003 programme, through which Romania gets 276.5 million euros as support for its EU accession preparations. The National Phare 2003 programme will see 265.50 million euros allocated, the Romanian-Hungarian Phare Programme for Crossborder Co-operation will get 3 million euros and the programme for the Romanian-Bulgarian crossborder co-operation will get 8 million euros. Jonathan Scheele explained the Phare 2001 programme, the contracting deadline of which had just expired, turned out successful, as the contracting level reached 96-97%. The Meeting of the Joint Romania-EU Parliamentary Committee last week acknowledged Romania's progress, and the authorities were encouraged to continue accession preparations, Scheele added. Scheele said Romania would get one billion euros in non-repayable funds from the European Union in the next three years, an unprecedented challenge for Romania that would require an improvement in its administrative capability. ZF