“Those audits identified deficiencies in the proper functioning of its CAP governance systems. Therefore, DG AGRI applied financial corrections for the financial years 2019 to 2021 to protect the Union’s financial interests. DG AGRI also asked the Slovak authorities to address the root causes of those deficiencies and continues to follow the situation closely,” it said in a statement.
European interest
Tomáš Zdechovský, a Czech member of the European Parliament who led a Committee on Budgetary Control mission to Bratislava in May and spent months gathering evidence on suspicious cases, said the embezzlement of EU funds in Slovakia was “systematic.”
“We’ve collected over 300 examples from Slovakia that show how, over the past 10 years, EU money has been consistently funneled to certain groups of people. These groups inflate the prices of all the contracts to enrich themselves,” the conservative lawmaker said, adding he had reported those 300 cases to the European Public Prosecutor’s Office (EPPO), OLAF and the European Commission.
“They draw the funds not for public benefit, but for private use. Like renovating their own homes or buying trucks and other things that have nothing to do with what the money was meant for,” Zdechovský said.
The PPA responded that it has “established control mechanisms” and that the right of every current or former employee to report corruption “is in no way restricted and can be exercised with full confidence.”
“PPA guarantees that any beneficiary who does not comply with the conditions of any project will be obliged to return the financial resources,” the agency added.
EPPO, which spearheaded the probe into the Greek farm fraud, said it was “in the process of verifying numerous allegations with a view to determine if it can exercise its competence in these cases under the applicable legal framework.” It added that it was “still too soon to share any more information.”
EPPO’s prosecutor for Slovakia, Juraj Novocký, told the Denník N daily paper last month that the office has been investigating dozens of cases related to the PPA and that in some cases, criminal prosecutions are already underway.
“In specific cases, charges have already been brought against certain individuals. I firmly believe that we will be able to review and investigate the package of several dozen cases we received within a reasonable timeframe, and once we have our findings, we will certainly inform the public,” Novocký said.