The government has submitted a draft amendment to the Investment Promotion Act to the parliamentary procedure this week, aiming to further facilitate and attract investments, primarily by reducing prerequisites and thresholds for applications for regional grants.
The prerequisite for applying for projects seeking to use non-repayable cash grants for job creation and grants for capital investment costs is the registered unemployment rate in the area where the grant is sought. The government proposes to lower the acceptable unemployment rate for qualifying applications from 15% to 10% in cases where support is requested for job creation up to its maximum amount of €15,000 or up to 30% of eligible costs. For a smaller requested grant of the same type, that is up to 20% of eligible costs for a newly created job or a maximum of €10,000, this framework is reduced from 10% to 15% to 5% to 10% of the unemployment rate. The minimum grant for job creation, which can amount to a maximum of €5,000 or up to 10% of eligible costs, can be used if unemployment is below 5%.
Regarding grants for capital investment project costs, the threshold of 15% of the registered unemployment rate will be reduced to 10%. The maximum grant of this type amounts to up to 20% of eligible investment costs in fixed assets, and a maximum of €2 million.
For similar grants amounting to up to 10% of eligible investment costs, or up to a maximum of €1 million, it is planned to lower the threshold to 5% to 10%, while the required number of jobs in the investment is also announced to be reduced from 50 to 30.
