Bureau Recommends: Secret EU payments up by 464%

The Bureau Recommends an article in the German Financial Times which exposes an increase in confidential EU payments between 2007 and 2010.

According to the Financial Transparency System a total of 342 projects worth €408m were classified as ‘confidential’ by the European Commission in 2010. In 2007 there were just 104 such projects worth nearly €87m.

The Commission has admitted that some payments were wrongly classified as confidential: they include €127m for the salary of Palestinian civil servants and €59.1m for an IT system in Honduras.

In answer to a parliamentary question by MEPMartin Ehrenhauser, the Commission admitted that payments of €79m for health and water projects in Moldova, were also wrongly classified as confidential and promised to ‘systematically correct’ such errors.

Read the original article from the front page of Financial Times Deutschland here.