£675m Of EU Budget Went To Fraudsters In 2015

The European Union lost an estimated £675m to fraud last year, investigators have said.

According to the European Anti-Fraud Office (OLAF), many of the false claims were concentrated in Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary, some of the trading bloc's poorest states.

One of the 1,400 fraud allegations investigated involved a £1m payment to a factory which wanted to upgrade equipment to chill vegetables.

When the transaction was investigated, officials found the equipment supplier and the factory owner were in fact the same person - and that the price of the machinery had been inflated.

Another common scam saw importers of Chinese solar panels falsify documents about where they had come from, meaning EU authorities missed out on import duties.

Although the fraud amounts to just 0.6% of the EU's budget, any misuse of funds is a sensitive issue ahead of the upcoming referendum on the UK's membership of the European Union.

In its annual report, OLAF said the funds paid out to dishonest claimants had fallen by £10m compared with 2014.

The organisation's director-general, Giovanni Kessler, has said he does not believe there is widespread corruption in how the union's funds are dispersed.

However, some officials believe that member states should do more to pursue those who defraud the EU, as only £142m of illicit cash was recovered in 2015.