Corruption in all 28 European Union countries has been studied by the EU themselves and have found that corruption is running rampant over the entire bloc of countries where people surveyed were asked if they were expected to pay a bribe, or to receive one. Over $120 BILLION is used in bribes. In the UK only five people out of 1,115 - less than 1% - said they had been expected to pay a bribe. It was the best result in all Europe, the report said. But 64% of British respondents said they believed corruption to be widespread in the UK, while the EU average was 74% on that question. In some countries there was a relatively high number reporting personal experience of bribery, In Croatia, the Czech Republic, Lithuania, Bulgaria, Romania and Greece, between 6% and 29% of respondents said they had been asked for a bribe, or had been expected to pay one, in the past 12 months. There were also high levels of bribery in Poland (15%), Slovakia (14%) and Hungary (13%), where the most prevalent instances were in healthcare. Ms Malmstroem said corruption was eroding trust in democracy and draining resources from the legal economy. The political commitment to really root out corruption seems to be missing, she complained. National governments, rather than EU institutions, are chiefly responsible for fighting corruption in the EU. But Ms Malmstroem said national governments and the European Parliament had asked the Commission to carry out the EU-wide study. The EU has an anti-fraud agency, Olaf, which focuses on fraud and corruption affecting the EU budget, but it has limited resources. In 2011 its budget was just 23.5m euros. Ms Malmstroem said that in some countries public procurement procedures were vulnerable to fraud, while in others party financing was the main problem, or municipal bodies were badly affected. #eu #europeanunion #europe #euro #corruption #bribe #bribery #ows bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-26014387
Posted on: Mon, 03 Feb 2014 13:15:53 +0000
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