Plans by Italy and France to win European Union funding for the construction of a new corvette have been boosted as Spain looks set to follow Greece and sign up to the program.

The planning for a new 3,000 ton corvette is a cornerstone of the new naval joint venture between Italy’s Fincantieri and France’s Naval Group which was launched last year and named Naviris.

The two firms are hoping to match Italian and French navy requirements with a jointly built, modular vessel that can handle patrol and surveillance missions as well as taking second-tier roles in anti-submarine and anti-surface missions.

The program, dubbed the European Patrol Corvette, has also been inserted in the EU’s so-called Permanent Structured Cooperation, or PESCO, list of recommended pan-European defense programs, which according the EU offers members “options on how to plan and bridge capability gaps in a collaborative manner.”

The PESCO corvette project is coordinated by Italy, with France as partner, but in recent weeks, Greece has also joined as a partner, following discussions between the countries’ navies. And now Spain is likely to follow, an industrial source told Defense News.

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