The first assessment was that companies had mainly made use of direct aid and the moratorium regarding banks. €135 million in direct aid had been requested and 18,000 moratoria amounting to over €3.6 billion. However, state-guaranteed loans were requested only very rarely - only 186 requests had been submitted. CSV-MP Laurent Mosar stated:
"This means that very clearly companies did not want to accumulate more debt – which is of course understandable. They want to pay back their ongoing loans and they want additional time to do that. And of course, they also want to make use of repayment-free aids. But they are not necessarily eager to request new loans"
The moratoria will expire at the end of the year, which according to Mosar raises the question of how companies will proceed from there. He pointed out that after the end of the year, there will probably still be a number of companies that cannot repay their loans. The CSV-MP stated that answers to this question had not been provided during the meeting on Thursday morning.
Meanwhile, the Minister for Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises, Lex Delles, confirmed that the Horeca sector as well as small-sized enterprises are suffering from the negative consequences of employees working from home:
"There are of course less people in their offices at the moment, and owners of restaurants or sandwich shops are noticing it as well. For them it means significantly less turnover and they tell us that they are only at about a third of the turnover of the months before"
On this subject, Laurent Mosar stated that if working from home is to be given a legal framework, it should be limited to one day per week.
When it comes to the travel sector, there are also a lot of questions which remain unanswered. Mosar stressed that it was nevertheless important that solutions were found. In this particular sector it is essential to find a balance between supporting the industry and the consumer. According to the CSV-MP, the voucher system was not bad but not enough. The sector itself had asked for the creation of a fund. While the government did not rule this idea out, it also did not want to commit to it just yet.
