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MosNews, 21.4.2006: Auditors say Europe wasted billions on assistance to Russia
The European Union has wasted billions of euros as part of its assistance program to Russia and other republics of the former Soviet Union, the European Court of Auditors said on Thursday, April 20.
The European Court of Auditors painted a bleak picture of how 7 billion euros ($8.6 billion) of EU assistance money — about 40 percent of which was allocated to Russia — had been spent since 1991. The British Financial Times newspaper reported that the auditors had called the effectiveness of spent money as “very low’’.
The report prepared by the auditors highlighted the unrealistic and vague content of many EU projects, poor implementation and the lack of communication between Brussels and Russian officials. Furthermore, the report found that some beneficiaries — including a city that received funding for a heating and power project — had never actually asked for funds.
However, Jacek Uczkiewicz, in charge of the court’s report, said that there was no evidence that fraud was responsible for the misuse or unaccountability of some of the EU funding.
Hans-Peter Martin, an Austrian member of the European parliament and a long-standing crusader against EU money wastage, said the European Commission should suspend its assistance program until it had carried out an investigation into how billions of euros had been wasted in the former Soviet Union. ”We are talking about billions that have disappeared,’’ he said, quoted by the Financial Times.
The auditors did not specify how much money had been lost. Their probe concluded that only five EU projects out of a sample of 29 completed by the end of 2003 could be considered “sustainable’’. For 12 of the audited projects, ”objectives were not met at all’’.
Brussels insists it has recently overhauled the assistance program, known as TACIS, to make it more efficient and the court’s report recognized that some of those initiatives, including devolving more of the project management to EU officials on the ground rather than in Brussels, had led to improvements.
Erschienen auf der Internetseite "MosNews", 21.4.2006.
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