The new programme announced by the Ministry of Industry and Trade for support of entrepreneurial entities is the COVID 2021. Together with the COVID – Uncovered Expenses programme, about which we will inform you next time, these are new programmes to help entities that have registered a decrease in revenues in relation to the Covid-19 pandemic. The bonus (reference) period is 10 January 2021 to end of March 2021.

Similarly to the previous programmes in the form of compensation bonuses, the condition is that the applicant must perform entrepreneurial activity under the Trade Licensing Act or in a similar way. In addition to natural persons and legal entities, an eligible applicant may also be a state-funded organisation (for which the special condition applies that 50 % of the income should come from entrepreneurial activity). Another condition is that the applicant registers a decrease in revenues by a minimum of 50 % as a result of the pandemic. This decrease will be assessed for the compared period against a comparative period.

The compared period is the period from 1 January 2021 to 31 March 2021. As the comparative period, the applicant will choose a period from 1 January 2019 to 31 March 2019 or from 1 January 2020 to 31 March 2020. An applicant, who was not established or did not begin his operation/activity until after 1 January 2020, may choose any three consecutive months in the year 2020 as the comparative period.

The applicant must further have at least one employee expressed in full-time equivalent (FTE)[1] (hereinafter “employee”). For the purposes of this programme, employees are understood to be employees in a labour relation, cooperating persons under the Income Tax Act and executives with a contract for performing an office. As of 11 January 2021, these employees need to have been registered for payment of insurance premium. The applicant further must not be a business in difficulties in the sense of the EC regulation no. 651/2014,^[2] must not have underpayments in relation to the state (with several exceptions in relation to the taxes), must not be in liquidation and distraint of its assets must not have been ordered.

The maximum amount of support is a product of CZK 500 multiplied by the number of employees multiplied by the number of days of the reference period. If the employer had less than three employees, support is set at CZK 1,500 per day. The limit for support has been set to the undrawn amount of EUR 1.8m for all programmes not yet drawn down.

As for concurrence with other programmes, this programme cannot be combined with support from the following ones: Compensation Bonus, COVID – Uncovered Expenses, AGRICOVID, COVID Culture and COVID – SPORT III Skiing Centres and partially with the COVID - Accommodation II. It can be combined with the Antivirus programme. The applicant further must not terminate his activity sooner than 3 months after the decision about provision of support has been issued. We would like to point out the obligation to retain all necessary documentation for a period of 10 years from the time the decision is issued. For the entire duration of this time, the applicant is obliged to submit to potential inspection.

Requests for support may be submitted from 12 April 2021 9:00 a.m. to 31 May 2021 04:00 p.m. by means of a system available on the website of the Ministry of Industry and Trade www.mpo.cz.

We would like to point out that this is not a full list of the conditions of the programme that need to be fulfilled. This is an overview of the most important conditions. Prior to submitting a request, it is necessary to check the fulfilment of all conditions and rules for support to be granted.

We will be happy to assist you with preparing the request and all necessary documents, so please, do not hesitate to contact us in this matter.

[1] Full-time workload is understood to mean eight hours of work within one workday; part-time or reduced workload can be mentioned in the request and they are included by using a respective coefficient (conversion to full-time workload) with precision to two decimal places, e.g. 0.25.

[2] The definition is stated in article 2 paragraph 18, the regulation is available here: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/CS/TXT/?uri=celex%3A32014R0651