Chief EU Prosecutor Laments Malta’s ‘Near-Zero’ Reporting Of Crimes Linked To EU Funds
In the roughly four months since the European Public Prosecutor’s Office was set up Malta has shown practically no effort to clamp down on corruption involving EU funds, chief prosecutor Laura Kovesi said this morning.
Kovesi, who is in Malta on her first official visit, since the EPPO started operating in June this year, said that while the office had received 2,200 reports since it started operating, only two had come from Malta.
No investigation was pursued in both cases since the cases did not fall within its remit.
Addressing a press conference Kovesi insisted Malta could not rely solely on investigative journalists to detect crimes.
“National authorities have a duty to inform us of any criminal conduct affecting EU funds,” she said.
The EPPO was set up to investigate crimes involving the misuse of EU funds. Malta had originally opposed plans for the office to be set up and then held up the start of operations after it had agreed to it by not nominating a prosecutor.
Kovesi said she did not believe Malta to be a clean country in the way it utilises EU funds, qualifying this however by saying that she did not believe any country really did.
“The bottom line is that without action there cannot be investigations, prosecutions and judgments. We cannot solely rely on investigative journalists,” Kovesi said.
She also noted that white-collar crimes were “underreported, underestimated and often tolerated”, adding that her team had even found it difficult to get to the bottom of who exactly was responsible for detecting crime in Malta.
“It was a little bit difficult for us to understand who is responsible as different institutions kept referring to each other,” she said.
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