And has anyone monitored the real-world sales and profits resulting from all that spending? What do you think?Įnsconced in Luxembourg is the European Investment Bank. Meanwhile, famous EU states such as Israel and Switzerland received much more. (Britain was a major taker until it left.) The in-built bias was underscored during the latest seven-year spending round, when the newish 11 members in Central and Eastern Europe, despite having a fifth of the EU’s population, were vouchsafed a mere 5% of the largesse available. Here, too, the beneficiaries are mainly an established club of “Old EU” companies in France and Germany, plus selected chums in academia. From 2014 to 2027 they will total €176 billion. After Brexit, Britain was scandalously expelled, though non-EU members Israel, Norway and Switzerland are kept in.Īlso among the big boondoggles are central allocations to R&D under programmes dubbed Horizon. Was the EU expecting America to invade? In a further moment of madness, the Chinese were asked to join, though they were later disinvited. The bizarre rationale was to rival the perfectly adequate American system, which reserves its tightest accuracy for military use by the US and its allies. As far as the numbers tell you, this wheeze has so far absorbed over €10 billion. The Union’s space trajectories reached their apogee with the Galileo scheme to send GPS satellites whizzing above the earth. Offshoots of Leonardo (Italy’s state-run defence champion) and Thales (France) are also prominent. Step forward Arianespace, run by Airbus (France-Germany-Spain) and Safran (France). The EU’s space policy amounts to a me-first system of outdoor relief for a charmed circle of giant French-controlled firms, with others involved for cosmetic decoration. The numbers here are deliberately obscured, but in recent years, upwards of €36 billion has been budgeted. Suggested reading Angela Merkel was no saintĪstronomical sums are also spent on space, where the EU works with outfits such as the European Space Agency. This number is a good surrogate for the income denied annually to the poor farmers in the global South who would love to feed the EU’s people. Development economists will tell you that, even as latterly reformed, this costs Europe’s consumers over €20 billion a year. It’s the essence of the EU’s rural policy that’s obscene, for it’s built on tariffs around food that are passed onto the consumer. Leave aside, if you can, the “small scale” rural defraudations over many decades, which by now must total many billions. Take one of its biggest programmes: agriculture, fisheries, and environmental good works, which account for €774 billion of the 2014-27 totals. The best you can do is survey the mechanisms that foment intellectual corruption, and can lead to all the criminal ills. You’ll never tally which eye-watering sums have been misallocated, misappropriated, or simply stolen. This is largely a result of the lack of central oversight, which means you can’t disaggregate skewed spending from theft. Yet the value encompassed, €4.5 billion, is microscopic compared to the scale of the problem. Only this year has it established a European Public Prosecutor’s Office to pursue malfeasance: despite a tiny budget, in its first few months EPPO has accumulated more than 300 cases. But Brussels has long been reluctant to exert central control over its cascades of cash. Of these scarcely fathomable sums, around two-thirds goes on various forms of regional and industrial support.Įstimates in the relatively well-policed UK suggest you can expect anything from 2% to 10% of project money to be syphoned off via fraud, collusion, or bribery. From 2014 to 2020, the bloc spent €960 billion, and to 2027 has plans for €1,820 billion more. It means monetary misappropriation, especially of governmental resources - and perfectly captures an affliction at the European Union’s core.įor decades, the EU has been providing heroic floods of funding for peculators, perhaps the greatest such flows the world has seen. The word peculation has largely been forgotten since it was used in the 18th century and beyond when the likes of Warren Hastings, the ruler of British territories in India, were busy defrauding the public purse.
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