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The Moscow Times, 21.4.2006: EU audit delves into loans
EU audit delves into loans
BRUSSELS -- Many European Union projects in Russia use money ineffectively and fail to achieve their objectives, EU auditors said Thursday, and one EU lawmaker called the findings a scandal.
The EU provides funds to Russia under a program aimed at promoting its transition to a market economy, but the European Court of Auditors deemed that the effectiveness of the use of the funds, worth billions of euros since 1991, was "very low."
Beneficiaries sometimes accepted assistance they did not actually want because of vague project objectives, unrealistic planning and a lack of dialogue with authorities, the report said.
Auditors found no evidence of fraud or criminal wrongdoing, despite an "irregularity" involving setting up a theoretical concern to facilitate a project that was a matter for Russian authorities, said the report author Jacek Uczkiewicz.
European Commission official Martyn Pennington told the budgetary committee the projects reviewed were drawn up based on procedures in place in the 1990s, which had since been reformed.
Russia has been the largest recipient of funds under the EU's TACIS, or Technical Assistance for the Commonwealth of Independent States, program, receiving about 40 percent of the 7 billion euros ($8.6 billion) allocated since 1991.
Hans-Peter Martin, an Austrian member of the European Parliament who has campaigned against corruption, said the report's conclusions were "a scandal." "It's incredible that no one seems to have noticed this," Martin told the parliament's Budgetary Control Committee. "We are talking billions that have disappeared."
Published in "The Moscow Times", 21.4.2006.
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