Malta has been showered with praise by Brussels for outperforming all other new EU member states in the absorption of EU structural funds.

Following the conclusion of EU accession negotiations in 2002, Malta was allocated a total of €88.74 million in EU funds to implement several projects, particularly infrastructural ones.

A new report presented by European Regional Policy Commissioner Danuta Hubner shows that the island has already absorbed 81 per cent of the allocated funds, more than any other new member state. Their average absorption rate stands at 75 per cent of their allocations. Technically, they have until the end of this year to make use of all the money allocated for this period.

"We are really impressed by Malta," a spokesman for the Europ-ean Commission told The Times.

"Although Malta is small, it still had no experience of the complicated methods and rules surrounding the execution of EU funds. The Maltese authorities have however managed to dedicate a lot of energy to make sure that no EU funds are wasted, and the results are outstanding."

The EU Executive noted that Malta has even managed to surpass many of the "old" member states that command vast experience in the implementation of the EU regional policy.

In fact, with an absorption rate of 81 per cent, Malta is doing better than Denmark (80 per cent), Italy (79 per cent), France (76 per cent), Greece (73 per cent) and the Netherlands (54 per cent).

Ms Hubner said that last year, the EU paid the highest-ever-sum for all cohesion policy instruments, amounting to €41 billion.

Brussels is now concentrating on the implementation of the EU funds allocated for the 2007-2013 budgetary period and has already adopted almost all the operational programmes for the new cycle, with the first being the one of Malta approved last year.