Affiliated entity

An affiliated entity is a legal entity with a structural link to a beneficiary: a parent, a subsidiary, another member of the same group, or an organisation under the same controlling body. It carries out project work and charges its costs directly to the project, but it does not sign the grant agreement.

The link must be legal and pre-existing, not commercial or convenient. A supplier is not an affiliate however close the relationship, and creating an entity in order to make it an affiliate is not the intended use. A university and its foundation, a group holding and its operating companies, a research organisation and its institutes: these are the ordinary cases.

It must be declared in the proposal, with its own PIC, and it is validated like any other participant. This is the rule most often broken by accident: an affiliate added after the grant agreement is signed requires an amendment, and costs incurred by an undeclared affiliate are not eligible. The correction is retroactive and expensive.

The beneficiary remains responsible. Its affiliate's costs are checked against the same rules, its affiliate's failures land on the beneficiary that declared it, and an audit finding against the affiliate is recovered from the beneficiary.

Used properly it is genuinely useful: it lets a group put the right internal capability on the project without adding another signatory to the agreement, and it counts toward the beneficiary's share of the work rather than being subcontracting. It does not, however, count as an additional partner for the three-countries eligibility rule. An affiliate is not an independent entity.