Last year the auditors found that £5.5billion of the EU budget was misspent. That included funding for spain to buy helicopters which it claimed would be used to patrol its borders.
It turned out they were used for this barely a quarter of the time. In Moldova, the EU handed out £1.4million for a “social development” project.
The auditors found that, in reality, “no underlying expenditure had been incurred”. In previous reports the audi- tors have highlighted subsidies for non-existent or wildly exaggerated olive farms and the Common Agricultural Policy is a breeding ground for all sorts of fraud.
Two years ago, a House of Lords investigation estimated that even the huge sums out- lined by the Court of Auditors could actually understate the actual level of fraud which peers said could be up to 12 times worse.
According to their report, frauds from cigarette smuggling to bribery and corruption “never see the light of day” because the EU can’t cope with the level and scale of theft. some member states, they said, will not report cases and others slip through the “tangled web” of EU investigation agencies.
Given that British taxpayers pay over one in 10 of the pounds spent by the EU, that is direct theft of our money. And even without criminality of the entire £117billion EU budget in 2013, £109billion was “affected by material error”.
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