The DOI revealed the additional funding in a statement released yesterday. The purpose of the Transition Facility is to continue to assist the new member states in their efforts to strengthen their administrative capacity to implement Community legislation and to foster exchange of best practice, said the DOI. The Transition Facility will be utilised for a number of projects among which those related to upgrade the Blood Transfusion Service, the Occupational Health and Safety Authority, improving Border Controls and the Asylum system plus assistance to Malta Enterprise, Malta Maritime Authority, Malta Standards Authority and the Tax Compliance Unit among others. These funds will therefore improve Malta’s current administration which will result in better services to citizens and businesses.
The 2004 Transition Facility allocation for Malta was originally set at ≠8.9 million. During the programming phase, however, the total value of the projects submitted by Malta substantially exceeded this figure, said the DOI. Normally a selection process would have been carried out to determine which proposals to take forward and which ones to drop in order to remain within the stipulated allocation. This year, however, during the intensive negotiations between the Planning and Priorities Coordination Directorate and Directorate-General Enlargement, the Maltese side made a strong case that all the projects that had been submitted were very important in the context of all the work going on to ensure that the administration would be in a position to deliver on a par with the other member states.
The Commission accepted this argument and agreed to support all the projects, even though this would entail ≠2.9 million additional funding on its part, which have been sourced from commitments which other new member states have not taken up. It is important to note that this extra allocation does not prejudice in any way the indicative appropriations for Malta for 2005 and 2006, said the DOI.
As with all EU-funded actions, government has to provide an element of co-financing. On this point, though, it was agreed that Malta’s co-financing rate would be only 8.52 per cent over the whole programme, which is
considerably lower than the rate usually required by the Commission, said the DOI.
In addition to the ≠11.8 million, but an integral part of the Interpretation Project, Malta secured additional funding of ≠300,000 directly from the Directorate-General Interpretation who will sponsor 10 Maltese nationals on a specialised course in interpretation at the University of Westminster in the United Kingdom.