The Minister for the Economy, European Funds and Lands Silvio Schembri and the Parliamentary Secretary for European Funds Chris Bonett launched a €2 million scheme, specifically aimed at very small (micro) businesses.
This is part of Malta’s plan for Recovery and Resilience which has identified 17 investments and 30 reforms supported by €316.4 million in funds for Malta to continue to be resilient. This scheme, which is aimed at micro-enterprises that have smaller projects, is part of other schemes that address digital, intelligent and resilient fostering, with a total of €15 million.
Micro companies are those that employ up to a maximum of nine people. The maximum amount that a company can apply for is €10,000 for each digitization investment in digital technologies, with partial financing up to 50% for the investment in Malta and 60% for the investment in Gozo.
Minister Silvio Schembri said that “as a country we recognized early on that the way forward for our businesses is digitalisation. The companies that have made the digital leap in our country have almost doubled but we are not happy, and with these funds we will be helping very small companies for whom it is more difficult than larger companies, so that they too can enter -digital world.”
Parliamentary Secretary Chris Bonett said that, “this scheme is also a clear proof of the government’s vision to make European funds, more than ever before, accessible to everyone. In the consultations we had in the past, it became clear that micro enterprises were finding it difficult to compete with larger projects that on paper seem more ambitious. In order to avoid this disparity, the need to create such a specific scheme was felt.”
