EU Transparency Shattered: Auditors Expose Billions in NGO Secrets

In other words, EU taxpayers' money is going to NGOs that aim at the establishment of the unitary, dictatoriarial Leviathan that the Left envisions.

From The European Conservative

By Tamás Orbán

Lending its weight to the Patriots’ arguments, the court ruled that finding transparent information on how NGOs are granted taxpayer funds was “practically impossible.”

After spending years pouring billions into left-wing progressive activism and demonizing conservatives for wanting financial transparency, the European Commission just received a giant blow from the inside. 

In a bombshell report, the EU Court of Auditors (ECA) confirmed what right-wing groups have been saying all this time: there is no transparency, no oversight, and no clue where most of the money sent to non-governmental organizations (NGOs) will end up.

“Transparency is key to ensuring credible participation by NGOs in EU policymaking,” Laima Andrikienė, the ECA member in charge of the report, said. 

However, despite some progress since our last audit, the picture of EU funding for NGOs remains hazy, as information on EU funding—including lobbying—is neither reliable nor transparent.

The key findings listed in the damning report speak for themselves. Most importantly, the EU seems to be intentionally violating its own transparency standards with its “opaque” system. Data is fragmented across incompatible online platforms, with key information mislabeled, buried, or outright missing—making reliable information “practically impossible” to find.

What the court did manage to find only paints an even darker picture. The ECA noted that there are no real checks in the system to ensure the recipients represent the values they claim to uphold. Many of the groups that the court looked at were not even classified as NGOs, while many of the clear-cut lobbyists who influenced EU policy-making at the EU Parliament or the Commission were either wrongly labelled in the official database or simply omitted.

What’s more, the court found systemic failures in the Commission’s accounting department, with certain grants listed as hundreds of millions less than what was actually awarded. Additionally, up to €2.6 billion was classified as “shared management” between member states, making it impossible to track where the money actually went.

But perhaps the most troubling finding was that EU funds are “overly concentrated on a small number of NGOs,” which disproves the notion of EU ‘pluralism’ and raises the suspicion of ideologically biased cronyism instead. Just 30 organizations received more than €3.3 billion—or 40% of the total amount awarded in the last decade—forming a select group of NGOs that Brussels trusts most to advance its progressive agenda.

“In short, the EU-NGO complex is murky, captured, and self-serving—and Brussels likes it that way,” the conservative think tank MCC Brussels said in a statement in reply to the report. As MCC Director Frank Furedi stated:

The systemic opacity revealed shows that the EU’s supposed commitment to transparency and accountability is nothing more than a façade.

The implications of the report cannot be understated, especially now. Brussels has been embroiled in a giant scandal for months, after Dutch investigative media revealed that the Green Deal—and all its catastrophic climate policies—were pushed through with the help of a massive lobbying effort by certain climate NGOs, funded by the EU Commission from taxpayers’ money.

Naturally, the mainstream EU elite has done everything to bury the scandal by refusing to hold proper inquiries, but it has since been revealed that the climate lobbying was just the tip of the iceberg. Watchdogs, including MCC Brussels, have found billions of euros worth of shady contracts with NGOs influencing decision-making and spreading all kinds of progressive ideologies, from pro-migration groups to LGBTQ activists, and even groups whose only goal is to protest and undermine conservative governments.

That’s why the Patriots for Europe (PfE) group, Brussels’ main conservative opposition, has launched a transparency campaign to shed light on the vast majority of contracts that are still hidden. They have submitted 86 freedom of information requests for up to 10,000 NGO contracts that are missing or buried in the databases in recent weeks, but so far these have only been rejected by the EU Commission, unlawfully.

At the same time, the NGOs themselves are heavily protesting these actions, as if they were afraid of being found to have engaged in political activism and interference. Over 570 NGOs signed a statement published by the umbrella organization Civil Society Europe on Monday, April 7th, to condemn the “unprecedented attack” coming from “certain” MEPs—the Patriots—which are “fueled by disinformation.” With the usual Orwellian language, the statement claims that the PfE’s current push for transparency “risks weakening democracy as a whole.”

Nonetheless, the Court agreed with the Patriots in as much that transparency is crucial to democracy and EU citizens should have the right to know how their money is being spent. 

The problem is that, being part of the same corrupt bureaucracy, not even the auditors called for tangible and swift solutions. The ECA’s recommendations are “perfunctory and lethargic,” according to MCC Brussels, which explained that a risk-based assessment of recipients is not called for until 2028, and no improvements to the Financial Transparency System are scheduled before 2029.

“By then, today’s beneficiaries will have taken the cash and vanished,” the think tank noted. “This isn’t just a bureaucratic failure – it’s a moral one.”