In an astonishing report by EU auditors it has been revealed that €6bn of EU taxpayers’ money was stolen by criminals in recent years and over €130m is siphoned off every year!

According to well respected Publisher EUObserver:

Fraudsters stole at least €8.8bn from the EU budget between 2002 an 2016, but EU institutions clawed back just €2.6bn, or one third of it, the report said. They stole another €391m in 2017, according to Olaf, the EU’s principal anti-fraud agency, with the vast majority of theft in the areas of EU aid to poor regions and fisheries.

But the actual figures are likely to be much higher because “the scale of fraud is underreported”, Thursday’s report said.

The lost EU money aside, most of the fraud suspects are also evading justice even in those cases that come to light. More than 540 cases should have gone to court between 2009 and 2016.

But to date, member states have indicted just 137 suspects and dismissed 171 cases, mostly due to “insufficient evidence”.

Part of the problem is that member states do not report all dodgy cases to Olaf.

Under the rules, they do not even have to monitor EU payments worth less than €10,000, even though many EU grants to farmers fall below that threshold.

Ten EU states bothered to report fewer than10 suspected fraud cases between 2007 and 2013, Thursday’s report noted.

But some of those who reported the fewest, such as Bulgaria, Greece, and Hungary, were the EU’s most high-risk states on corruption, the EU auditors said.

The commission has developed an IT platform, called Arachne, for “identifying the riskiest projects and beneficiaries” of EU funds, but Germany and Greece do not bother to use it. Poland and Spain hardly use it either.

Whoever is to blame, the current set up leaves EU officials in the dark when they sign cheques for farmers in, say, Slovakia, or for new bridges in, say, Kosovo.

The report concludes by saying that far more must be done to gain control of the eye-watering sums being pilfered across Europe:

The [European] Commission lacks comprehensive information on the scale … of fraud. Its official statistics on detected fraud are not complete

DGs and member states can bar known fraudsters from EU contracts in an EU database called EDES, the auditors noted.

But the debarment system excluded just 19 entities over the past two and a half years, even though there were 820 suspected EU fraud cases in 2016 alone.

That kind of performance limits the deterrent impact of this system

More drive and leadership is needed in the EU to take real action against fraud in EU spending and ensure that strategic fraud risk management and fraud prevention would be clearly referred to in the portfolio of one commissioner

The EU needs a robust fraud reporting system, providing information on the scale, nature and root causes to fraud.

Unity News has done a search of UK based mainstream media outlets and there has been next to NO coverage of this. However Channel 4, normally a pro- EU bastion, has done extensive coverage on this to their credit. Questions must also be asked of why the remain establishment is attempting to suppress this vital information in relation to the endemic corruption within the EU. Why are they not using their significant investigative resources to expose this?

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