Enter the cleaner; Fighting fraud.

 “The EU gets a prosecutor to protect taxpayers' money.
MANY THINGS are simple for national governments but hard for the EU. That includes punishing people who steal from it, since the EU's member states have mostly been wary of giving it the power to prosecute their citizens. The bloc's main treaty requires its members to punish chicanery involving EU funds, and the European Commission has a detective agency--the European Anti-Fraud Office, or OLAF--to investigate. But until this year it was up to national authorities to take the culprits to court. If a country declined, there was no European body that could do so.
The new European Public Prosecutors' Office (EPPO), which was launched on June 1st, aims to fix that. The EPPO can bring criminal charges for misuse of EU funds and for a number of other offences, such as VAT and customs fraud. It is headed by Laura Codruta Kovesi, a redoubtable prosecutor who from 2013 to 2018 ran Romania's vigorous national anti-corruption agency, convicting thousands of bent officials and business people.
The EPPO's significance goes beyond the criminals it can punish or the money it can recover. Corruption creates deep splits in the EU. Countries like Germany and the Netherlands fear that money they contribute to the EU budget will subsidise fraud in countries like Italy that are plagued by organised crime, or in those like Hungary where the courts are controlled by the very politicians who are on the take. Donor countries are reluctant to grant the EU bigger budgets unless they are confident the money will be spent honestly.
Yet five of the EU's 27 members have not joined the EPPO. The holdouts include Denmark, which has opted out of all EU justice affairs, and Sweden, which says it will join soon. More worrying, they include Hungary and Poland. Both are big takers of EU aid, with governments that have made their justice systems subservient to politicians. Hungary has the highest fraud rate of any EU member.
The EPPO is based in Luxembourg, in one of the steel and glass towers that make many EU agencies feel like robotic limbs grafted onto Europe's medieval bones. The European Court of Justice is next door. The agency seems far removed from the skulduggery it expects to prosecute. But the headquarters house only the EPPO's central apparatus, including Ms Kovesi's office and the college of 22 prosecutors, one from each participating country, who oversee the agency. Grouped into permanent chambers of three prosecutors each, they make the pivotal decisions on each case: whether to file charges or dismiss them. The investigation and prosecution itself are handled by teams of prosecutors in each country, nominated by their national governments but approved by the EPPO.
One benefit of the EPPO is centralisation, says Andrés Ritter, the German member of the college. Fraud tends to cross borders. In his former job as a prosecutor in Germany, Mr Ritter supervised a case in which [euro]18m ($21m) of diesel was falsely imported as cleaning products to evade EU energy taxes, then re-exported and sold as fuel in the Czech Republic, Italy and Poland. Such cases used to require joint investigation teams from the countries concerned and Eurojust, the EU's agency for judicial co-operation. Requests for information and European warrants for searches and arrests added time and complexity.
Many of the EPPO's cases will be similar to those handled by OLAF and national prosecutors. These can be quite concrete, as with the Italian-Romanian consortium that won a contract to produce hovercraft but made no effort to do so, or the multinational Mafia ring that used EU agricultural funds to buy second-hand farm equipment instead of new kit.
Others are abstract financial crimes. Danilo Ceccarelli, the Italian member of the college, notes that on paper the EU runs a huge trade surplus with itself--over [euro]300bn in 2018, according to one study. This is logically impossible, and probably an artefact of tax fraud: exporters overstate the value of goods in order to recover higher VAT rebates. The study estimates the total could run to over [euro]60bn a year.
The most sensitive cases are those involving politicians. Anti-corruption advocates hope the EPPO's independence from national governments will make it easier to prosecute elected officials. Czech authorities have reportedly forwarded to the EPPO their case against Andrej Babis, the prime minister. Mr Babis, one of the Czech Republic's richest citizens, is accused of illegally profiting from EU subsidies to an agriculture company he formerly owned. He denies these charges.
But keeping clear of political influence is difficult. Janez Jansa, Slovenia's prime minister, has refused to approve the prosecutors his country must delegate to the EPPO. Opponents claim that he fears his party will be unable to control them. In Bulgaria Boyko Borisov, the prime minister for most of the past decade, gained control of the body that appoints public prosecutors, who repeatedly exonerated government officials in scandals.
Furthermore, prosecutors must bring their cases in national courts. "It would be useful to have a European court of criminal procedure, no question," says Mr Ritter, but that is a project for the distant future.
Yet the EPPO does not have to accept whomever national governments send it. Ms Kovesi rejected six of Bulgaria's original ten proposed delegated prosecutors. And the body's statutes are set up to protect independence. The 22 prosecutors in the college are barred from supervising cases involving their own country. The delegated prosecutors serve an initial five-year term that can be renewed indefinitely at the EPPO's discretion. They cannot be recalled by their home countries.
Hundreds of cases have already been forwarded to the EPPO. Mr Ritter expects charges will be filed in some cases before the end of the year. To establish credibility it should seek to score some high-profile convictions quickly, says Laurent Pech, an expert on EU law at Middlesex University: "It's a new, unelected body, so its legitimacy depends on output."” [1]

1.    "Enter the cleaner; Fighting fraud." The Economist, 21 Aug. 2021, p. 42(US).