Does the CAP fit?
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 dismay of both the Modernisers, who prefer a simpler more [...]
“Fraud, chicanery & rule-bending” … part II
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 (2000-2008) of the EU’s anti-fraud office, OLAF. Together, they illuminate the breadth and depth of [...]
Austrian farm subsidies on the map
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 and interpretation, raw data means very little so it was a great pleasure to work over the summer to provide [...]
“Fraud, chicanery & rule-bending”
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 tradition of what the newspaper called “fraud, chicanery and rule-bending” in Europe’s sprawling sugar subsidy program. Beneo-Orafti [...]
Short film tells the story of farmsubsidy.org
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 year 2000 when I was working as a Special Adviser [...]
In praise of… Lithuania
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 of releasing the information, they worry about the additional work that such requests may cause. The degree of resistance [...]
Tory Eurosceptics claim EU farm money
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 Cumiskey for More4 News, the offshoot of Channel 4 News. The story was also [...]
Germany’s farm subsidy data finally out
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. There are 247,356 payments totalling 5,230,144,601 euros. It is important to note that Bavaria continues to refuse to release its data, and we believe thta the payments in Germany’s [...]
Who are Germany’s ‘invisible men’?
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 payments to these 21 recipients is 16.8 million euros, of which 8.9 million euros is in [...]
New data: 194 German farm subsidy millionaires
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 April deadline. With elections now out of the way, the German federal government has [...]