Giving back

In its latest report, released last month, the European Court of Auditors identified Spain as the most ineffective spender of EU money in the bloc and called for repayment of misused or unspent funds

Mark Nayler

Malaga

Friday, 16 August 2024, 13:38

Spain's Socialist-led government loves to present itself as a massive spender. Pedro Sánchez made an especially big deal of the 2022 and 2023 ... budgets, both of which were vastly inflated by the EU's 'Next Generation' Covid recovery payouts. The 196-billion-euro spending plan for 2022 was the biggest in Spain's history, and purported to allocate funds so that the "recovery will reach everyone", as finance minister María Jesús Montero said at the time.

It would be more than a little embarrassing for Sánchez, then, if his government were asked to reimburse EU funds that have either been misallocated or not spent. Yet that's exactly what the EU's fiscal watchdog, the European Court of Auditors (ECA), is requesting. In its latest report, released last month, the ECA identified Spain as the most ineffective spender of EU money in the bloc and called for repayment of misused or unspent funds.

Spain ranks third in terms of the amount of money that it receives through EU schemes, behind Poland and Italy. The ECA reports that, while those two countries typically deploy 99% and 78% of their EU funds, respectively, Spain uses only 74% of its allocation. On average, EU member states spend 90% of the funding they receive from Brussels.

According to the ECA, the mistake made most frequently by the Spanish government between 2018 and 2022 was allocating EU money to individuals or schemes later found to be ineligible. One example concerns the use of funding designated for 'NEETs', young people not in education, employment or training; but on closer inspection, the ECA found that almost a quarter of the recipients of one such scheme were enrolled at a university.

The ECA's concerns about Spain's public spending now reflect those of other major EU institutions. The EU Commission, for example, has criticised Sánchez's government for using Brussels money to fund programmes already accounted for in the national budget. In 2020, the health ministry reportedly purchased face masks using money from the European Regional Development Fund, a scheme aimed at green initiatives and digitalisation. Allegedly questionable face mask contracts are also at the centre of the so-called Koldo corruption case, details of which the Commission has already passed to the European Anti-Fraud Office.

Transparency - or rather the lack of it - is another of the EU's major concerns. Monika Hohlmeir, president of the bloc's Committee on Budgetary Control, travelled to Madrid last February to quiz the government on its use of Next Gen funds, without much success. As Hohlmeir impatiently awaits the information she's requested, Sánchez's administration is being asked to give a little back to the wider community - but not in a way it will want to shout about.

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