Corruption in EU

EU should reduce the risk of corruption and allow societies to benefit fully from their rightful investment funds. And that means better lives for millions of people.

Corruption is the abuse of power for private gain. Corruption takes many forms, such as bribery, trading in influence, abuse of functions, but can also hide behind nepotism, conflicts of interest, or revolving doors between the public and the private sectors. Its effects are serious and widespread. Despite being the best performing region, with an average score of 66, Western Europe and the EU are not immune to corruption. Issues of conflict of interest, abuse of state resources for electoral purposes, insufficient disclosure of political party and campaign financing, and a lack of media independence are prevalent and should take priority both for national governments and the EU.

There is a need, to legally define and regulate lobbying to prevent and detect undue influence on policy-making. Hungary, Poland, Romania, Croatia and Greece are the five EU countries that do not reach the 50 per cent threshold in the 2019 Corruption Perceptions Index. There is a lot of fraud committed within EU involving EU funds, but it has been very difficult to tackle this effectively and one of the reasons is that all member states take a different approach. In Malta, corruption is undermining the rule of law. A significant lack of political integrity contributes to politicians and others hiding illicit wealth behind secret companies.

Several scandals involving the Panama Papers, the collapse of a Maltese bank and the “golden visa” scheme that sells EU citizenship to wealthy overseas investors highlight a need for better and stronger EU-wide anti-money laundering supervision. Corona bonds proposal was firmly resisted by the countries with stronger fiscal discipline while the countries known for “black holes” into which the funds disappear were very much interested in shared borrowing. Issuing the bonds without accountability would be an ideal way to siphon the finances and is calling for a disaster because the financial burden would then be shared by all 27 state members.

Topics

• EU Values
• Green EU
• Brexit / Rejoin EU
• Nationalism
• Climate Crisis
• Corruption
• Tax Havens
• Human rights
• EU Army
• External Threats