Brussels wants to know what happened to a 1.1 bn Euro subsidy for, among other things, nature protection in the Romanian Danube Delta. That money seems to have largely leaked to local politicians and entrepreneurs.
The city of Tulcea in the Romanian Danube Delta. Three quarters of the European subsidy for regional development in the area appears to have been spent outside the district.
The European Commission and the European Anti-Fraud Office (OLAF) will both investigate allegations of misuse of EU funds earmarked for the Danube Delta, a protected nature reserve in southeastern Romania.
The reason for the two separate investigations is an article that was published in NRC in May, in collaboration with the Süddeutsche Zeitung and Romanian journalists from Info Sud-Est. The article shows that millions of euros, intended for improvements for residents and nature in the Danube Delta, have leaked to local politicians and entrepreneurs. The total subsidy for the region amounted to 1.1 billion euros.
After the publication, Dutch MEPs from PvdA, CDA, GroenLinks and JA21 put questions to the European Commission. In response, the Commission is launching an investigation, a spokesperson confirmed: ‘The Commission is investigating allegations of mismanagement of EU funds published in the media’.
The Commission will cooperate with Romanian authorities on this. They check the projects concerned for possible misuse of European funds, according to the Commission spokesperson. Pending the outcome of the investigation, the undistributed part of the grant has been frozen ‘to ensure that the EU budget is protected’. If irregularities or fraud are confirmed, national authorities and the Commission will demand money back, the spokesman said.
Dutch MEPs are not yet satisfied with the answers they have received from the European Commission. Michiel Hoogeveen, (JA21) , calls the Commission’s replies ‘vague’. According to Lara Wolters, member of the European Parliament for the PvdA, the Commission ‘stays in the dark about the prevention of fraud in new payments. That is not reassuring yet, so a hearing with the Commission has been requested,” she writes on Twitter.
Among other things, the European money was to improve the living standards of poor fishing communities in the Romanian Danube Delta – an isolated region in the province of Tulcea – and to protect the endangered ecology of the UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Since 2014, the European Commission has disbursed more than EUR 1 billion to the Danube Delta through a complicated financial mechanism of ‘Integrated Territorial Investments’ (ITI for short). The money came from various EU funds and was spread over eight different programmes. Four Romanian ministries were involved in the distribution.
Three-quarters of the subsidies for regional development were paid to companies located outside the Tulcea district. Only seven of the nearly 1,200 projects focused on conservation. Instead of the intended destination, companies received money from the EU investment from politicians and businessmen.
An example is county council president Horia Teodorescu, who had an advisory role in the ITI Danube Delta and secured more than 2.5 million euros for his construction company. His business partner’s company and his wife’s furniture factory also each received EUR 420,000 from EU funding.