Ms Kadri Simson:

I am afraid that I am not well informed about these cases. This is some kind of service relating to the Director-General for Trade, that is if the European Commission is involved at all. I am not in a position to give the Senator an answer on that.

On the recovery and resilience facility, RRF, and the principle of do no significant harm, we strongly suggest that member states should avoid investments into the standard assets. We advise them that the recovery plans have to have high ambition on the climate-related projects. Just yesterday we approved the plan for Poland. It will dedicate 47% of financing to climate-related projects. We face a situation when the Commission proposed a set of six sanctions that covered all the Russian oil imports, both seaborne and pipelines, and some member states had no alternative routes in place so they had to create a plan for how to build alternative pipelines. It was impossible to finance them from energy funds because we had just completed negotiations and our Connecting Europe Facility is no longer suitable for fossil fuel interconnections. We have committed that we will finance only the kinds of pipelines that are hydrogen-ready. We truly believe that all the member states are willing to stop payments to Russia but they must do that in such a way that their security of supply is taken care of. That was behind our decision to provide some flexibility to use recovery funds to build these alternative routes. This is not something that we encourage but without it we cannot expect that we can reach consensus on banning all Russian oil products. That is an honest explanation as to why this flexibility was introduced.