I am old enough to remember the days when Angela Merkel was “Europe’s real leader,” the leader of the free world, and so on. And all this was as she made mistake after mistake, mistakes obvious in real time to anyone paying attention. But, despite some crazy talk that she could now act as a mediator between Russia and Ukraine, she’s history.
Not so Pedro Sánchez, Spain’s hard-left prime minister, currently being proclaimed by Europe’s bien-pensants as the continent’s new new “real leader,” based mainly on his opposition to Donald Trump and his fondness for online censorship. Sánchez has been busy of late, throwing open Spain’s doors to (resident) illegal aliens, and calling for a European army despite Spain’s long history of freeloading off NATO.
But wait, what’s this?
Controversy involving the alleged use of EU funds to top up shortfalls in pensions has sparked a major debate in Spain.
The Spanish Court of Auditors revealed last week a series of “budget modifications” which included the use of €2.4 billion in funds from the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF), the primary engine of the EU’s post-pandemic recovery package, to top up pensions in 2024.
These funds were meant to help post-pandemic investment, not to top up an empty till, but:
Madrid authorised the use of “surplus appropriations” from the post-Covid recovery funds, said auditors, because of an “insufficiency of budgetary appropriations to meet unavoidable obligations related to civil service pensions”.
The exceptional modifications “should have been better justified”, the auditors concluded.
Well, that’s one way of putting it.
Heaping insult upon insult, Spain has been the second largest recipient of these funds, having already received, Euraktiv reports, €60.5 billion in grants and €17.3 in loans from the total €724 billion European recovery package.
Euraktiv:
“It is absolutely unacceptable to use EU funds from the RRF to cover up budgetary problems in the national pension system,” Andreas Schwab, the chairman of the European parliament’s budgetary control commitee, told the newspaper El Mundo on Monday.
Oh yes, there’s also this from AP:
European auditors said Wednesday that they’re unable to clearly trace the way that billions of euros are being spent out of a massive fund helping European Union countries rebuild their economies from damage caused by the COVID-19 pandemic…
The auditors notably struggled to get details about recipients in France. The French authorities said that was because “it was too administratively burdensome to obtain information on final recipients and amounts paid, even upon request,” the report stated.
Tant pis.