• On 14 February elections, the spokesperson said that although the Government "disagrees" with the judgement of the High Court of Justice of Catalonia "it does not want to cause uncertainty with such a relevant date" and "right now it is not on the table to file an appeal against it"

The Executive Council analysed the report Next Generation Catalonia, the document delivered by the Commission for the preparation of the Plan for Economic Reactivation and Social Protection containing the provisional proposal of Catalan projects candidates to obtain resources from the Next Generation EU fund. The Minister of the Presidency and spokesperson of the Government, Mertixell Budó, reported during a weekly press conference that these are 27 emblematic projects selected by the CORECO among 542 initiatives presented by the administration, private companies, consortia and third sector entities, which add up to a total investment of €41 billion. On the one hand, these investments enable to "enhance the capacity for the competitiveness and development potential of Catalonia" and, on the other hand, "they stimulate profound changes needed to transform the current Catalan production economic model into a more prosperous, inclusive, resilient and sustainable one", explained Budó.

The spokesperson said that the Government will send these proposals "in the coming days to the government of the State to proceed with its assessment", projects described as "unbeatable", because "the proposals are either implemented in Catalonia or they cannot be implemented anywhere else, such as the quantum computing or the European chip". In this sense, she assured that the projects "if approved, they can be implemented already in 2021". She also reminded that proposals can be sent until the Government and the State Executive publish the initial calls to request the funds.

Over the last few months, CORECO has studied and evaluated the proposals received in conjunction with the country's social and economic agents and with the Catalonia-Next Generation EU Advisory Committee, the group of experts created specifically to promote the projects with the greatest potential and transformative capacity. The selection has been made taking into account 10 prioritization criteria: their uniqueness, their degree of maturity, the amount, the marketing potential, the investment capacity in future trends, their leadership strength, their contribution to reindustrialization, their promotion of territorial balance, their contribution against against climate change and their ability to generate welfare and social progress.

Decree-Law to Manage the Funds of the Recovery and Resilience Mechanism and the REACT EU Fund

The Government has approved a decree-law for the implementation and management of funds from the Recovery and Resilience Mechanism and the REACT-EU Fund for the Administration of the Catalan Government and the public sector. The minister reminded that these funds are an instrument, approved by the European Council in July 2020 to deal with the damage caused by #Covid19 crisis, with a global budget of €750,000 million. In this sense, today's agreement "is part of the government's desire to facilitate, simplify and streamline administrative processing in order to benefit the maximum number of projects from European funding through these funds", she explained.