Brussels is to extend the EU’s lenient approach to policing state subsidies, as it unveils guidelines this week that will allow member states to keep pouring cash into cleantech investments until the end of the decade.
Designed to avoid continent-wide subsidy races and wasteful grants to uncompetitive companies, the EU’s unique state aid regime empowers the European Commission to monitor state support, with tens of billions of euros recouped from companies in total.
But successive economic crises prompted Brussels to suspend or relax enforcement across key sectors of the economy — an approach that will be extended on so-called clean technologies in the latest guidelines, according to a draft seen by the Financial Times.