EU finance ministers on Friday (7 November) extended until 1
September 2015 a deadline for contributions to the EU budget, given the
"unusually" high corrections this year.
The corrections are made automatically each year when countries report their gross national income - with some member states getting money back, while others have to pay more.
EU budget commissioner Kristalina Georgieva will table a proposal in the coming weeks detailing the tweaks to the existing rules, which would have seen countries pay interests on every month of delay if they didn't pay their contributions by 1 December.
She acknowledged that the budget corrections became a political hot potato this year because they were "unusually large" - €9.5 billion in total, compared to €360 million last year.
Under the new rules, if in one year the corrections exceed €5 billion or twice the monthly contribution for one member state, a deadline extension will kick in, allowing national treasuries to pay in instalments by 1 September of the following year.
The national contributions were not discussed, but since Britain has a yearly rebate on its contribution - negotiated in the 1980s by then-prime minister Margaret Thatcher - this means that it will only have to pay around €1 billion by next year, instead of €2 billion by December as originally calculated by the commission.
Read more: EUobserver / UK, Netherlands get nine extra months to pay EU bill
The corrections are made automatically each year when countries report their gross national income - with some member states getting money back, while others have to pay more.
EU budget commissioner Kristalina Georgieva will table a proposal in the coming weeks detailing the tweaks to the existing rules, which would have seen countries pay interests on every month of delay if they didn't pay their contributions by 1 December.
She acknowledged that the budget corrections became a political hot potato this year because they were "unusually large" - €9.5 billion in total, compared to €360 million last year.
Under the new rules, if in one year the corrections exceed €5 billion or twice the monthly contribution for one member state, a deadline extension will kick in, allowing national treasuries to pay in instalments by 1 September of the following year.
The national contributions were not discussed, but since Britain has a yearly rebate on its contribution - negotiated in the 1980s by then-prime minister Margaret Thatcher - this means that it will only have to pay around €1 billion by next year, instead of €2 billion by December as originally calculated by the commission.
Read more: EUobserver / UK, Netherlands get nine extra months to pay EU bill
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