European structural funds investigation
How are European Union structural funds managed? That is – literally – the €347bn question.
That’s the amount the EU plans to spend between 2007 and 2013 on around 2m projects designed to boost development across the continent, particularly in its newer, poorer member states.
Starting on Tuesday and until the end of the week, the Financial Times will be printing the results of a long-running investigation into EU structural funds.
For the past eight months, the FT and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, a UK-based body, have jointly looked at how the EU spends what amounts to €50bn a year – the biggest line in the community budget after agriculture.
The aim is to lift the veil on a complex system we think has not received the level of scrutiny that this scale of public spending usually attracts.
We started with a simple, if time-consuming, task: putting together a single database of all the beneficiaries of EU money.
This is more complicated than it sounds: though all the information on who receives structural funds is technically public, the Commission itself does not hold the data. It can only be found in a disparate array of 600 databases in 21 different languages and as many IT formats.
A FT/BIJ team has spent months “scraping” that data, which you will be able to have a look at here.
The database makes it possible for the first time to search for specific recipients wherever they “tapped” structural funding in Europe. (Unsurprisingly, many multinationals seem to have spread the word on how to access cash in a range of EU countries. Try a few.)
It makes it possible to look, by region, by country or across Europe, who the biggest recipients are.
To supplement these insights from the database, we’ve interviewed all the relevant commissioners, members of the European parliament, national administrators, experts and so on to get the proper analysis of where the money goes.
We’ve steered clear of the stereotype that all EU money ends up wasted, stolen or mismanaged – though we will be looking at that, too.
It is more a case of trying to gain insights into what has become a giant and opaque bureaucracy. How do the beneficiaries get to access the money? Who gets left out? Who decides where the money goes?
Find out in the Financial Times starting on Tuesday, and on our dedicated web page: www.ft.com/eu-funds
Across the globe: Gideon Rachman and his FT colleagues debate international affairs on