NEWS

Tom Van Dyck
+32 475 90 90 91
t.vandyck@liedekerke.com

Freya Mareels 
+32 475 25 11 50
f.mareels@liedekerke.com

Wim Dedecker
+32 491 36 03 99
w.dedecker@liedekerke.com

COVID-19: More flexibility for deploying EU budget money

The Council has adopted the Coronavirus Response Investment Initiative Plus. This Regulation amends the rules on the use of EU structural funds in order to allow Member States to refocus resources on crisis-related operations. More precisely, all existing reserves in the structural funds for 2020 can be deployed to tackle the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Moreover, Member States will be able to request 100% financial support from the EU budget for the period between 1 July 2020 and 30 June 2021.

The act is due to enter into force on 24 April 2020.

Heightened risk of fraud in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic: be wary of offers that are too good to be true!

The FSMA has concluded that fraudsters are not hesitating to exploit the COVID-19 pandemic to claim new victims and fraudulent investment offers are becoming ever more frequent and take on a variety of forms (emails, advertisements on the internet and social media, cold calling, etc.). The FSMA advises everyone to be even more vigilant when investing during this lockdown period. Moreover, the FSMA underlines that questions relating to the COVID-19 pandemic, can be directed to its new call center.