Carlos Moedas, the new research and innovation commissioner, has promised MEPs that the €2.7 billion diverted from Horizon 2020 to Juncker’s investment plan will still be channelled towards research and innovation.
On December 4, Moedas appeared before the European Parliament’s industry, research and energy committee to give more details on an investment plan announced last week by his boss, Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker. The Juncker plan would invest €21 billion of public funds in an attempt to leverage a much larger amount of private funding. €2.7bn of that investment is to come from the Horizon 2020 programme, prompting MEPs to express concerns that this will take money from planned research programmes.
Moedas told MEPs that he has been pressing the commissioner for growth Jyrki Katainen, who is leading implementation of the investment plan, to allocate the diverted funds to research projects and not to any other purposes. Moedas also said that the guidelines of the investment plan will specify that, and that it was his intention of protect Horizon 2020 budget from any additional diversion of its funding.
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