by Giles Cadman
The European Union is an organisation with an inflated sense of self worth. It wanted to increase its budget when the individual nations of Europe were being forced into austerity, which the Eurocrats could not see as hypocrisy.
Now the European Union Select Committee has found fraud against the taxpayer is far higher than the Eurocrats will admit to.
More than £4 billion of taxpayer cash is “disappearing” from the European Union budget every year because officials are failing to get a grip on fraud, a damning parliamentary report said today.
This is a massive amount of money in tough times, and the EU needs to start policing fraud better.
The committee said it believes frauds ranging from cigarette smuggling to bribery and corruption “never see the light of day” because the EU has failed to grasp the scale of the problem. This is because some member states are reluctant to report suspected cases and others fall through the gaps of a “tangled web” of EU investigation agencies.
It estimated against the European Union budget is likely to be around €5 billion (£4.3 billion) every year, or “maybe even more”.
Official European Commission figures reporting fraud of €404 million show just a “glimpse” of the scale of the problem, the committee said.
