This is Paul Adamson and welcome to In Conversation, the regular podcast of my online magazine InCompass.

I chat informally with personalities from a wide variety of backgrounds on a wide variety of subjects.

If you like this podcast, you can go to the magazine's website, Encompass-Europe.com,

or any of the main platforms for free access to all the podcasts to date. I hope you enjoy this

conversation. My guest is Mastapa Rabin.

Mastaparaban is the manager director and practice head of Europe at the Eurasia Group.

Mijbiz, we've done these podcasts, a number of occasions in the past.

There's always plenty to talk about.

I thought today we'd start with the EU recovery plan, next generation EU,

the hailed as a major success when it was finally agreed by Member States last year.

But is it my imagination or there seems to have been some kind of obstacles put in its path now as we speak?

Great to join you again, Paul.

No, you're right to flag new hurdles that have emerged.

The most recent being a decision by the German Constitutional

Court to look into the legality of the recovery fund. This is in the aftermath of the German Parliament

actually signing off on the own resources, legal basis that underpins the

recovery fund. And now we're in a process of delay, really, as the German Constitutional Court

considers how they're going to manage and handle the case.

So there's a number of different ways in which this can now play out.

I suspect the best case scenario is you're looking at a slight delay,

but money still landing to member states, July kind of time, around that timeframe. But there are, there are

tail risk scenarios, more consequential scenarios where you end up with a longer delay because

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