by Georgi Gotev
Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen on Friday (30 June) answered allegations by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban that the EU was “bankrupt”, which he had published earlier on social media.
At the press conference following the two day EU summit which was dominated by Poland and Hungary blocking agreement on EU migration policy, von der Leyen was asked how she would respond to Orban’s accusations made the previous day that EU money had disappeared.
“Everyone has a single question in Brussels right now: where has the money gone?” Orban said in a video posted on Facebook and Twitter just ahead the summit.
He said the Commission had proposed an amendment to the EU budget, “and is requesting hundreds of billions more in contributions from member states”.
The Hungarian Prime Minister said this raised the question of “how is it that the European Union could be pushed to the brink of bankruptcy”.
Orban said that member states were being asked to contribute another €50 billion to the budget “so that they can give it to Ukraine even though they can’t account for the money we’ve already contributed”, adding they wanted more money to cover the interest on earlier EU loans.
“These are the loans from which Poland and Hungary have yet to receive a single penny”, he said.
The Commission proposed on 7 June €189.3 billion for the 2024 EU budget, including almost €4 billion to repay EU borrowing. The budget will need to be negotiated and agreed by member states and the European Parliament in the coming months.
Orban added it was “unserious” of the EU to “want more money for migration, though not for border protection, but to bring migrants in”.
“First and foremost we want to know what all that money we have contributed so far has been spent on,” he said.
Asked to comment, von der Leyen made it clear that Orban didn’t raise the issue when they had the chance to talk at the summit.
She said that if he had asked, she would have answered that “we all can witness that the EU is strong and prosperous, and we have a very transparent system of checks and balances: the Court of Auditors, the Parliament, the Council, just to name three.”
“We are also strongly supporting the principle of rule of law, mainly also to fight corruption, and to make sure there is clear accountability and transparency in any kind of institutions we have in the EU”, she said.
The Commission chief had earlier explained that over the 16 months of Russia’s war against Ukraine, the EU executive had taken €30 billion from the bloc’s budget to support Ukraine financially, and that these funds had come primarily from been mainly from reserves in the budget.
“These are now depleted”, she said, adding that the EU will have to discuss in the weeks to come the period beyond 2023 until the end of the financial period in 2027. This, she said, had not been a topic of the summit and would need to be discussed at the level of finance ministers.
*first published in: Euractiv.com
By: N. Peter Kramer
