As Poslovni Dnevnik writes, there is an ongoing debate here in Croatia as to how the government intends to implement its intention to link the payment of job preservation subsidies for the month of July to vaccinations, ie COVID passes/certificates.
The proposal has been unpopular to date, as it seems difficult to imagine that the powers that be might leave those who haven’t yet been vaccinated out in the cold financially as a way to turn their hand.
There are still many unknowns about how the government intends to actually implement its plan. For example, there is no clear answer to the question of what one does with a worker who has a COVID certificate at the time of an inspection because they have a valid negative test, and not because they’ve been fully vaccinated or have evidence of recovery.
Since March last year, when it made the decision on providing very generous aid to the economy, the government has moved the goalposts, both in the sense of the conditions and the amounts. Given that the measure was adopted urgently, the conditions under which the support could and couldn’t be obtained, or if Croatian employers would have to repay it had to be determined along the way.
The reimbursement of aid was a factor each time a new obstacle to its use was added, and 25,154 Croatian employers have had to repay the aid in part or in full from the beginning of its use to date.
By the middle of last week, a total of 11.034 billion kuna had been paid out to Croatian employers in the form of aid for job preservation, and more than 25,000 such employers had returned almost 255.8 million kuna of that same aid, according to data that Novi list received from the Croatian Employment Service.
This means that so far, Croatian employers have returned 2.3 percent of the state aid or every 43 kuna provided by the state to help them during the pandemic.
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