Nikolaus Kurmayer for Euractiv.

An EU official has said that the EU has stopped all funding for high risk countries,

Chinese inverters, this affects the EIB and the like.

Particularly most of those inverters are from Huawei in China.

Does that mean that the Commission is now viewing this,

this company as a high-risk company and should this affect sort of the privileges afforded to Huawei and any trade association or Interest representation of which it is a member,

like access to Commission meetings and the like.

I remember, I recall last year that the Commission said there would be a case by case assessment.

Now the Commission has issued a blanket ban.

So have you changed your position and what will be the policy going forward for interactions with Huawei? Thank you, Nico.

I ask Siobhan to help you with that. Thanks, Nicholas, for the question.

So, I'm gonna, let me tackle the, the first part of your question about what the Commission has actually put in place vis a vis,

inverters from countries that we consider high risk.

So back in December, we published a communication, a joint communication on strengthening EU economic security.

Might have escaped some of your views,

but these communications do include quite important information where we identified 6 high-risk areas for immediate action.

So, in mitigating those risks, we're of course working closely with member states, industry, and our trusted partners.

And so we identified that among the most pressing threats is the risk of disruption of the EU's critical infrastructure by foreign actors.

So of a particular urgency and thus our focus has been the reliance on inverters in clean energy networks from high-risk vendors.

So our risk assessments have confirmed those threats, including manipulate manipulation of electricity production parameters,

the disruption of electricity generation, and even unauthorized access to operational data.

So in practice, this could mean a shutdown, a remote shutdown of member states' networks leading to countrywide blackouts.

So given the gravity of these threats, the Commission is taking action.

In the medium term, the Cybersecurity Act will offer the possibility to ban the use of inverters from high-risk suppliers in the EU market.

But nevertheless, we decided that we would take concrete action right now.

And so that has included developing guidance on restricting the use of EU funds for projects involving inverters from high-risk suppliers.

I would probably allow my colleague, Thomas to go into the elements related to Huawei. Let's have Thomas to elaborate. Thanks Siobhan. Hi Nico.

Just to elaborate from the Cyber Security Act point of view, what we have done with the Cyber Security Act, and this is a proposal that is now with our co-legislators is of course to be able to list potential third high risk third countries and subsequently,

some of the companies in strategic sectors for the European Union and this is where,

I mean in the past, Huawei alongside ZTE have already been listed and we have a recommendation.

To encourage our member states indeed to exclude Huawei and ZTE from their telecom,

operators and from their connectivity infrastructure, just to compliment specifically on Huawei.

So concerns indeed as Siobhan said, were already here. Thank you Siobhan. Thank you, Thomas. Nico, you have follow up. Go ahead.

Will there be sanctions for trade unions or interest representation groups that have Huawei as their member,

such as not access, no access to meetings for groups that have Huawei as a member? Thank you.

On this we have to Check and get back to you.

Any other questions on this topic, or we can move somewhere else.

I don't see any, so who wants to continue? Go ahead.