EU audit chief: €600m Italy recovery fund fraud likely to be repeated

Good morning from Brussels,

There is “absolutely” a risk that a recent case of the alleged embezzlement of €600 million from the EU Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF) in Italy could be repeated, Tony Murphy, President of the European Court of Auditors (ECA) president told Euractiv in an interview.

“Because of the limited control, or lesser control framework, compared to the standard EU funding based on multi-year budgeting (MMF), the risk of such incidents occurring is high,” Murphy said.

He also warned that the bloc would soon face significant “budgetary pressure” as the RRF grants must be repaid.

“NextGenerationEU is aptly named because the next generation must pay for it,” he said.

The RRF will finish by the end of 2026 and Murphy expressed his scepticism about it continuing beyond that date.

Read the full interview to Thomas Moller-Nielsen.

On the other hand, the EU’s economic chief Paolo Gentiloni suggested on Tuesday that RRF should be turned into a “permanent” joint borrowing tool, Euractiv’s Jonathan Packroff reported.

Driven by political motivations and the upcoming EU elections, European regulators have unleashed a storm of enforcement actions and investigations related to the Digital Services Act (DSA) and Digital Markets Act (DMA), experts told Euractiv. Read Julia Tar’s analysis on the matter.

Meanwhile, according to a draft of the EU’s Strategic Agenda seen by Euractiv’s Sofia Sanchez Manzanaro, EU leaders are expected to put food security at the heart of the bloc’s agricultural policy for the next five years.

On the foreign policy front, the EU’s top diplomat Josep Borrell warned that a full-scale conflict in Europe is “no longer a fantasy” and therefore more funds for defence will be needed, while Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton said the Commission will need “extra time” to present the European Space Law legislative proposal, possibly after June’s EU elections.

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BERLIN

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MADRID

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ROME

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NICOSIA

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PRAGUE

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WARSAW

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BRATISLAVA

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SOFIA

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BUCHAREST

Far-right Romanian party pledges to fight ‘Satanists and globalists’ in Brussels. The candidates of the extremist party Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR), running in the European and local elections on 9 June, have pledged to “combat globalists and Satanists” while defending Romanian values such as sovereignty, family, and church. Read more.

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[Edited by Sarantis Michalopoulos, Daniel Eck, Liene Lūsīte, Alice Taylor]