The Minister of Economy Álvaro Santos Pereira has announced a new credit plan for small and medium business enterprises worth €2 billion in a bid to boost the economy.
The plan has been labelled SME Growth 2013 (PME Crescimento 2013) and Santos Pereira revealed that €400 million of the total sum is destined for small enterprises with a four-year maturity and a six-month grace period.
The other €1.6 billion is intended to help export companies, along with €6 billion already made available by the Ministry of Economy.
This project has arisen in response to the huge demand by companies for credit from PME Investimento (SME Investment), which originally stood at €1.6 billion butwas still not enough to meet the demand amounting to €2.8 billion.
Santos Pereira stressed the fundamental need for a “total fight” against bureaucracy as “the only way to create jobs, richness, and growth”.
In order to achieve this, he said that “every government entity must make companies’ life easier” and make Portugal more investment-friendly.
Along with the credit lines, Santos Pereira has already said that changes in the IRC (corporate tax) system will also be an important step to push forward Portugal’s re-industrialisation (see Algarve Resident edition of December 21 2012).
