Thank you, Minister. Good afternoon, everyone.

Today we had a packed ECOFIN agenda. Here are some outcomes.

The minister already outlined the general approach on the VAT one-stop shop, which is certainly welcome news.

We held our regular exchange on the economic situation and outlook.

I will briefly touch on this point since the Commission will present our detailed projections for the EU economy in the Spring Economic Forecast next Monday.

For now, I can say that the EU economy ended 2024 slightly stronger than expected and maintained its momentum at the beginning of the year.

At the same time, without pre-empting the Spring Forecast, it is clear that the US tariff announcements and the uncertainty they have ushered in negatively affect the EUs growth and investment outlook for this year.

Risks also seem to be tilted to the downside.

This highlights the need for the EU and its Member States to remain focused on taking urgent action to improve competitiveness and secure our long-term prosperity.

The Commission also provided its regular update on progress with the implementation of the Recovery and Resilience Facility.

A total of €311.4 billion has been disbursed so far.

The Commission is currently assessing 17 payment requests amounting to a total of €62.2 billion, covering 613 milestones and targets.

We reminded Member States once again of the legal deadline for all milestones and targets to be met by the end of August 2026.

This means that we have some 15 months left to submit all outstanding payment requests and supporting evidence.

With that in mind, we highlighted two key points at todays meeting:

Firstly, the need to accelerate implementation efforts and meet the set timelines to submit payment requests and produce the relevant evidence.

Secondly, Member States need to urgently review their plans and remove any measures that are no longer feasible before the RRF legal deadline.

Finally, I welcome todays endorsement of the targeted revision of the Dutch, Slovak, Spanish, and Portuguese recovery and resilience plans.

We also held our regular exchange on the latest developments related to Russias full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Todays discussion focused on the situation of the Russian economy, with a presentation from the Stockholm Institute of Transition Economics (SITE).

Their analysis highlights the unreliability of Russian statistics, and how the Russian economy is not performing as well as its official statistics suggest.

The Commission broadly agrees with this analysis and the overall increasing fragility of the Russian economy.

This underlines the importance of the international communitys ongoing efforts to limit the Kremlins capacity to continue its war of aggression against Ukraine.

I would also like to mention that last Thursday, the Commission disbursed a further €1 billion under the G7 Extraordinary Revenue Acceleration initiative.

It is important to highlight that these loans are to be repaid with proceeds from immobilised Russian State assets in the EU, meaning that Russia will pay for the destruction it is causing in Ukraine.

This brings me to our policy debate on SAFE, the new instrument that will provide up to €150 billion for defence investments.

In short, there remains very broad agreement on the need for Europe to take on more responsibility for its defence and security.

SAFE is an essential element of facilitating the investment needed to make this happen.

With SAFE we can spend more, faster, better, together and European, and also without partners if the conditions are met.

Finally, a brief word on the annual Economic and Financial Dialogue with Regional Partners which took place this morning.

It has never been more important for the EU to continue building win-win partnerships around the world.

This mornings meeting was an important opportunity to engage with partners on how, together, we can work to improve the competitiveness of Europe and the region in view of recent geopolitical changes.

Thank you.