Latest posts
Strategies and policies for a low-carbon EU budget
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Reform of the EU budget matters deeply for the pursuit of the low-carbon economy. For there is arguably no policy lever as important as the EU budget for setting the direction of EU action. While the size of the budget remains close to just one pe...
When Crime Pays: How the EU subsidises illegal fishing
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Fishsubsidy.org today publishes a list of 42 convictions of fishing vessel owners that have also received EU subsidies under the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP). The study, which focuses on two major EU fishing nations, Spain and France, involves match...
Does the CAP fit?
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Some are Gold Diggers, happy to reap the benefits of EU membership and let others pick up the tab. Others are Misers: fans of budget discipline and happy to negotiate side deals and ad hoc rebates to keep their overall contributions down, much to the...
“Fraud, chicanery & rule-bending” — part III
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This is the third and final part of a series compiling instances of subsidy fraud in the common agricultural policy (although the illegal importation of goods in order to evade customs duties are also considered). Part one was published last week, pa...
“Fraud, chicanery & rule-bending” … part II
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This is the second of three posts that compile instances of subsidy fraud in the common agricultural policy (although the illegal importation of goods in order to evade customs duties are also considered). Each case is drawn from the annual reports (...
Austrian farm subsidies on the map
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FollowTheMoney.eu and its two current projects, farmsubsidy.org and fishsubsidy.org, are based on a very simple methodology: more transparency in public policy will lead to a better informed public debate and better public policies. Without analysis...
“Fraud, chicanery & rule-bending”
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The New York Times dubbed it “the mystery of the sugar triangle” – the huge subsidy fraud discovered when Belgian and European investigators raided the offices of Belgian sugar maker Beneo-Orafti last spring. The case belongs to a long traditio...
Spanish tuna vessel Alakrana got 4.3 million euro in subsidies
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A few months ago the Spanish tuna fishing vessel Alakrana hit the headlines after it was captured by pirates off the coast of Somalia. A huge rescue operation was mounted and it is understood a seven-figure ransom was paid for the release of the vess...
Short film tells the story of farmsubsidy.org
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Fields of Gold is a 20 minute film that tells the story of how a small group of journalists, researchers and computer programmers opened up the 55 billion euro a year common agricultural policy (CAP) to public scrutiny. It all began for me in the ye...
Budget review to be published in late November
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After the reconfirmation of Barroso, the Commission is getting some sort of direction for the budget review now. Apparently a publication of the document during the EP’s Strasbourg plenary week (23-26 November) is envisaged. A presentation at t...
In praise of… Lithuania
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When making a request for detailed information on government budgets it’s common to encounter resistance from the government officials who handle the request. They question why the information should be made public, they fear the consequences o...
Slipping through the net - how EU countries evade new budget transparency rules
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European Union countries are failing in the promise to make the common fisheries policy more transparent, claims a new report from FishSubsidy.org. With the policy undergoing a fundamental review, the report—“Slipping through the net: How EU coun...
Barroso’s budget policy in the second term
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Last week Commission President José Manuel Barroso published his political guidelines for a second term in his bid to convince the European Parliament to support him. The lengthy but vague document offers little concrete ideas but a lot of social-de...
Tory Eurosceptics claim EU farm money
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Analysis of data on EU farm subsidies in the UK reveal that three Eurosceptic Conservative MPs have claimed more than £500,000 in EU farm subsidies in the past two years. A great piece of work by long-time farmsubsidy.org network member Annamarie Cu...
Budget review congestion in December 2009?
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Many had hoped that the discussion about the budget review had long taken off by now. Unfortunately, we have the current Commission President Barroso who is a little too sensitive in his attempts not to alienate any member state. While I appreciate t...
Find out how your taxes helped empty the seas
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Today sees the launch of a new transparency website from the FollowTheMoney.eu stable. It presents data on 97,260 payments totalling 8.5 billion euro from 1994 to 2006. Of this 3.4 billion euro was paid to vessels and 5.1 billion euro to non-vessel r...
EU scores as good as Germany on transparency index
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Jack has previously written about the Open Budget Index 2008 which charts a number of countries from around the globe for their budget transparency efforts. The UK, South Africa, France, New Zealand and the United States came on top of the list with...
Germany’s farm subsidy data finally out
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Nils Mulvad has completed the extraction of data from the German government’s website. It’s available to anyone to download as a raw zipped data file here or with geocoding by us here. There are 247,356 payments totalling 5,230,144,601 eu...
Who are Germany’s ‘invisible men’?
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We are making good progress extracting all the farm subsidy payment data published on the German government’s website. While doing so we have found 21 recipients for whom no information on name, municipality or postcode is given. The total paym...
New data: 194 German farm subsidy millionaires
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Alone among Europe’s 27 member states, Germany had been holding out against publishing data on farm subsidy recipient but today it has finally taken steps towards complying with the new EU law on budget transparency, some six weeks after the 30...
