Spain will receive the full €71 million compensation requested as a result of the damage caused to the horticultural industry during the ‘killer cucumber’ fiasco.
After reviewing three of the compensation applications due to doubts as to their validity, the European Commission finally made the awards. In doing so, the EC had to raise its compensation fund from €210 million to €227 million.
Spain receives the requested €70.97 million, Poland gets €46.3 million (their original request was €81 million), Italy gets €34.6 million and Holland gets €27.1 million.
The grants are designed to cover 50% of the losses sustained after Germany went round blaming everyone else for a deadly outbreak of E.coli poisoning during the period May 26th and June 30th 2011.
The idea is that the member states begin handing out compensation immediately and are then reimbursed from EU funds at a later date.