Altus Befektetési Zrt.

Peter Heil is an internationally respected expert on the European Union’s development funds, including both pre-accession instruments, and the EU’s cohesion policy. Having served for 15 years in the Hungarian civil service, 13 of those years in leading management positions, he currently works as the Director of ConsALT, the Consulting Division of the ALTUS Group.

Dr. Heil graduated and obtained a Ph.D. at the Budapest University of Economic Sciences. He studied EU integration at the Universities of Heidelberg and Oxford, before starting a civil service career in 1995.

From 1998 to 2002 Dr. Heil headed the Assistance Co-ordination Secretariat of the Prime Minister’s Office, responsible for the EU’s Phare and ISPA pre-accession programmes. From 2002 to 2007 he worked as vice president of the National Development Agency (NDA), responsible for the use of the EU structural and cohesion funds. There, his main responsibility was the design and setting-up of Hungary’s institutional system for the EU’s structural and cohesion funds. In parallel, he was also involved in the drafting of Hungary’s first and second National Development Plans, forming the basis for the use of EU funds in the country.

During this time, Dr. Heil was responsible for a number of key initiatives that had a profound impact on Hungary’s institutional system, and helped to boost absorption capacity to many times its previous level. They included the design and management of 2 major EU-funded institution building and training programmes supporting the establishment of Hungary’s EU cohesion policy institutions, the initiation of the first and largest EU-funded project generation scheme for cohesion policy, the standardisation of project selection and management procedures for all Managing Authorities, and the establishment of a most flexible system to plan and manage EU-funding in the national budget.

He also has extensive management and training experience. Starting from scratch, he gathered and trained a group of young project managers, who are now leading officials of the NDA, and an internationally respected team of cohesion policy experts. He was responsible for the integration of all Managing Authorities into a single institution.

In 2007, Dr. Heil moved, as Head of the Minister’s Cabinet, into the Ministry of Local Government and Regional Development, with responsibility for running the administration of the Ministry. Later, he occupied similar positions in the Ministry of National Development and Economy as assistant state secretary, as well as head of cabinet in the the Ministry of Energy and Transport, and the Office of the Prime Minister.

He also served, for many years, as the head of the Cohesion Policy Sub-Committee of the Inter-ministerial Committee for European Integration. Since 2004 he regularly represented Hungary on the European Council’s Structural Actions Working Party that is in charge of elaborating the legal rules governing cohesion policy. In 2008 Dr. Heil was invited to DG Regio’s High Level Working Group charged with the design of the future of Cohesion Policy, where he worked up to his resignation from the civil service.

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