The high quality online magazine EUobserver ‘is a not-for-profit, independent online newspaper established in Brussels in 2000. We value free thinking and plain speech and aim to support European democracy by giving people the information they need to hold the EU establishment to account.’
They say: ‘Our team of experienced journalists file daily news reports from the EU capital and beyond and do in-depth investigations on topics of special interest to the public. If you want EUobserver to look into a specific issue, please contact our editors. We protect our sources. EUobserver is the only independent news media covering EU affairs in Brussels and all 28 member states. We are not funded by the EU institutions.’
Now in an outstanding piece of investigative work they have uncovered a fraud at the heart of the EU that has seen BILLIONS siphoned off. Our Lead UNN Correspondent David Clews now analyses this in detail:
Over €6bn of EU taxpayers’ money was stolen by criminals in recent years and over €130m is still being lost each year, EU auditors have warned.
Those were the stark figures in a report on EU budget fraud by the European Court of Auditors, the bloc’s financial watchdog, on Thursday (10 January).
The fact that that the supine media and remain establishment are not comfortable exposing that all is not well within the EU shows that people are more interested in remaining part of the EU no matter what than exposing the endemic corruption within it.
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 [European] Commission lacks comprehensive information on the scale … of fraud. Its official statistics on detected fraud are not complete,” the report said.
This is frightening that such huge sums of money are being pilfered from taxpayers across the EU. The fact the theft is coming from poorer regions and fisheries is a slap in the face to the left behind regions of the UK and our devastated fishing communities.
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, Olaf had said.
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.
Incredibly anything less than 10k Euros in EU payments do not even need to be monitored. The abuse of the Common Agricultural Payments system is well known and the fact that so many fraudsters are evading justice is another sign the EU has so much money it simply doesn’t care.
Ten EU states bothered to report fewer than 10 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.
Can you imagine what the level of fraud would be like if these countries actually reported fully and accurately the amount of cases that were taking place?
No central risks assessment
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.
“Currently, fraud risks are assessed at DG level,” Thursday’s report said, referring to directors-generals (DGs) – the 37 men and women who run the EU commission’s various departments.
“No central fraud risk assessment is carried out for the commission as a whole … they [the DGs] do not use other information coming from external sources, such as national crime statistics or official government reports, or analyses and reports by NGOs,” the EU auditors said.
Makes you wonder how much power rests in the hands of these Director Generals and the fact they could be easily corruptible with the amount of money going amiss. Likewise it is another example of the EU being a supra-national body and not engaging with proper statistics at a national level.
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”, the auditors said.
“More drive and leadership is needed in the EU to take real action against fraud in EU spending,” the auditors’ report, which was non-binding, added.
Looking ahead to the next European Commission, the EU should “ensure that strategic fraud risk management and fraud prevention would be clearly referred to in the portfolio of one commissioner”, the auditors said.
The EU needed “a robust fraud reporting system, providing information on the scale, nature and root causes to fraud”, the financial watchdog said.
As we close this report please read the last sentence again. We are constantly told how the EU has kept the peace and is essential for Britain’s needs. According to it’s own financial watchdog it doesn’t even have a “robust fraud reporting system” in place.
The EU has become so cumbersome and bloated that like all fading empires it has become systemically corrupt. The new Prime Minister must ensure the UK leaves on the 31st of October and moves on with its own affairs. The EU is suffering from systemic failure and cannot continue with this and the risk of implosion grows every day.
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Opinions from the Unity News Network (UNN) editorial team & various contributors. | UNN always clearly distinguishes between news and opinion pieces and as an open minded outlet we publish views from a variety of people and organisation that do not necessarily reflect the views of UNN or its writers. Articles published under UNN Opinions are always opinion pieces and if published on behalf of a contributor will contain that authors name at the start of the piece.
