The Court of Audit has highlighted in a recent audit report that, at the sectoral conferences held between the Government and the autonomous communities on the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan, “no decision” was adopted regarding coordination of this program, which handled around 100,000 million euros between transfers and loans.
This Recovery Plan, approved in 2021, allowed Spain to access a European financial injection of up to 102,560 million euros, with 79,854 million in non-repayable aid and 22,706 million in loans.
A large part of the key initiatives funded with these funds, including the Perte, were designed by the General Administration of the State without the direct involvement of the autonomous governments.
Parties such as PNV and Esquerra Republicana (ERC) have been repeatedly demanding to intervene in the drafting of these projects and even to territorialize them. The Executive, however, rejected that decentralization of the funds, arguing that there already was a sectoral conference in which the central Administration met with the communities to coordinate resources.
The Court of Audit has recently examined the functioning of that sectoral conference in a report on the set of governance bodies of the Recovery Plan and found that the coordination of the body, chaired by the former first deputy prime minister, María Jesús Montero, and in which the competent autonomous councillors participated, was practically nonexistent.
Four meetings in five years and of an “informative” nature
According to the audit report, up to January 2026 the conference had met only on four occasions: three times in 2021 and a final session in June 2024.
In detail, the Court of Audit points out that the first meeting took place in January 2021 and served to formally establish the conference. The second appointment, in April of that same year, was intended to approve its internal organizational regulations, and the third, in August, focused on informing about the status of the Recovery Plan and the next steps for its implementation.
Subsequently, the conference remained inactive for almost three years, until it was convened again in June 2024, a meeting in which the Minister of Economy limited himself to presenting the design and functioning of the Fondo de Resiliencia Autonómica (FRA).
"There is no record of any decision"
"There is no record that the sector conference has adopted any decision (agreement or recommendation) regarding coordination of the implementation of the Plan", underlines the Court of Auditors in the document that Europa Press has had access to.
Next, the report details that all these meetings had a "mainly informational" character about the design of the Recovery Plan.
The auditing body has also not found data on the activity of the Commission of Coordinators of European Funds, an instance called upon to support the conference in the tasks of preparing and monitoring its meetings.
Given this situation, the Court of Auditors reiterates a conclusion already set out in earlier auditing work: the participation of the autonomous communities in the definition and execution of the Recovery Plan required the adoption of formal agreements or recommendations between the State and the rest of the administrations involved, as provided for in the Law on the Legal Regime of the Public Sector.