Council Regulation (EC) No 2012/2002 of 11 November 2002 establishing the EU Solidarity Fund (‘the Regulation’) provides in its Article 12 that a report on the activity of the Fund in the previous year shall be presented to the European Parliament and to the Council. Exceptionally, given that the mobilisation procedure of the Solidarity Fund for all disasters of 2017 was only completed in 2018, the present report covers the activities of the Fund during both years 2017 and 2018. The report summarises the applications received and the cases closed during the reporting period. The Commission assessed all applications according to the criteria laid down in the Regulation as amended in 2014.
In 2017, the Commission received ten new applications for financial contribution from the Solidarity Fund, namely from France, Greece, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Portugal and Spain. In addition and most importantly, Italy revised and updated its application initially submitted in 2016 for the series of major earthquakes that started in August 2016 and continued into early 2017.
Portugal, Greece, France and Spain requested advance payments for five applications of which three could be granted. The Commission paid out these advances totalling €6.5 million within a few weeks after receiving the applications.
Two of the applications received, namely those for flooding in Murcia and fires in Doñana in Spain, did not meet the conditions of the Regulation and therefore were not accepted. The decisions on the other eight new applications from 2017 were adopted in 2018. Moreover, the Commission closed six earlier Solidarity Fund interventions.
In 2018, the Commission received four applications for the Solidarity Fund assistance, namely from Bulgaria, Cyprus, Italy and Romania, of which the Commission could not accept the application from Cyprus. None of the three other countries requested an advance payment. In 2018, the Commission paid out the total amount of €2.3 million to Bulgaria. The decisions on the applications from the other two countries received in 2018 were still pending at the end of that year.
Annex I presents the ‘major disaster’ damage thresholds for mobilising the Solidarity Fund applicable in 2017 and 2018. Annex II presents an overview of the applications approved in 2017/2018 including the relevant financial information.