August 9, 2026

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August 9, 2026

Newsletter

The European Post

Policy • Diplomacy • Strategic Insight

LATEST
New EU Gas Market Rules Take Effect With Consumer SafeguardsDeforestation Regulation Holds Its December Deadline Despite CutsDigital Omnibus Delays Europe’s High-Risk AI Deadline to 2027Europe’s Schools Confront a Widening Basic Skills GapRule of Law Report Finds Progress but Trust Still LagsIRIS2 Gains 66 Satellites as Brussels Signs the Rollout DealNature Restoration Plans Come Due as Member States Race a DeadlineECB Rates Hold at 2.25 Percent as Frankfurt Waits on the DataEU Budget Talks Turn to Cohesion as Ireland Takes OverWildfire Response Stretches Europe’s Emergency Fleet ThinCan Europe’s Quantum Plan Match Its Big Ambitions?Armenia Edges West as Moscow’s Grip Slips AwayEurope Inherits the World’s Aid Bill It Cannot Fully PayAir Passenger Rights Get Their First Overhaul in Two DecadesErasmus Opens a 5 Billion Euro Round for Skills and MobilityCeuta Crisis Pushes the EU Toward Faster Migrant ReturnsBulky Parcels Face a Packaging Crackdown From August 12Can Europe Build Its Drone Wall Before 2030 Arrives?Indonesia’s Trade Deal With Europe Nears Its Final SignatureEurope Leans on Beijing to Keep Climate Talks Alive Before AntalyaNew EU Gas Market Rules Take Effect With Consumer SafeguardsDeforestation Regulation Holds Its December Deadline Despite CutsDigital Omnibus Delays Europe’s High-Risk AI Deadline to 2027Europe’s Schools Confront a Widening Basic Skills GapRule of Law Report Finds Progress but Trust Still LagsIRIS2 Gains 66 Satellites as Brussels Signs the Rollout DealNature Restoration Plans Come Due as Member States Race a DeadlineECB Rates Hold at 2.25 Percent as Frankfurt Waits on the DataEU Budget Talks Turn to Cohesion as Ireland Takes OverWildfire Response Stretches Europe’s Emergency Fleet ThinCan Europe’s Quantum Plan Match Its Big Ambitions?Armenia Edges West as Moscow’s Grip Slips AwayEurope Inherits the World’s Aid Bill It Cannot Fully PayAir Passenger Rights Get Their First Overhaul in Two DecadesErasmus Opens a 5 Billion Euro Round for Skills and MobilityCeuta Crisis Pushes the EU Toward Faster Migrant ReturnsBulky Parcels Face a Packaging Crackdown From August 12Can Europe Build Its Drone Wall Before 2030 Arrives?Indonesia’s Trade Deal With Europe Nears Its Final SignatureEurope Leans on Beijing to Keep Climate Talks Alive Before Antalya

European Prosecutors Scale Investigations as VAT Fraud Cases Climb

Monika Beta
Senior Correspondent

Bucharest: The European Public Prosecutor’s Office published its 2025 operational digest in the Romanian capital this week, choosing the city where its founding chief prosecutor Laura Codruta Kovesi built her reputation to underline what officials in Luxembourg now describe as the office’s transition from a start-up phase into a steady-state criminal justice institution embedded across twenty-four participating Member States. The numbers underline that shift. The office reported 2,956 active investigations at the end of 2025, estimated damage to the Union budget standing at 26.4 billion euros, and provisional asset freezing orders worth a record 2.1 billion euros executed during the year.

The composition of that caseload tells the more interesting story. Cross-border value-added tax fraud, which the office handles where the damage to the Union exceeds ten million euros, accounted for more than a third of the investigative volume and almost two-thirds of the estimated harm. Carousel schemes involving missing-trader chains across Belgium, Romania, Poland and Germany now form the backbone of the office’s most resource-intensive files, with several investigations linked to the post-pandemic surge in electric vehicle and solar panel imports where intra-Community supplies have been exploited to claim fraudulent VAT refunds. The office’s 2025 case in the energy sector, which led to coordinated searches in seven Member States and the seizure of crypto-assets later valued at 230 million euros, has become the template for what prosecutors describe as the modern fraud playbook.

Operational coordination has tightened as the caseload has grown. The European Delegated Prosecutors, the 159 national prosecutors who operate as the office’s first line, are now backed by a centralised analytical capability in Luxembourg that maps suspicious transaction patterns across customs, VAT and structural funds data. Romania remains the single largest source of investigations referred to the office, a function partly of the volume of EU funds that pass through the country and partly of the operational maturity built up during the years Kovesi led the National Anticorruption Directorate. Italy and Germany follow closely, with Bulgaria and Poland completing the top five.

The expanding remit is now creating tension with national administrations. Three Member States, including Sweden and Hungary, remain outside the enhanced cooperation framework, and discussions on whether to extend the office’s competence to environmental crime and sanctions evasion are stuck in the working group of the Justice and Home Affairs Council. The Commission tabled a draft regulation in February that would add serious cross-border environmental crime to the office’s mandate, citing the need for coordinated prosecution of illegal waste shipments and large-scale unauthorised emissions. Capitals are split, with the Nordic and Benelux delegations supporting the extension and several southern Member States arguing for a parallel national competence rather than transfer of jurisdiction.

Sanctions enforcement raises sharper questions still. Successive sanctions packages against Russia required Member States to criminalise serious breaches, but the practical work of investigating cross-border circumvention schemes sits awkwardly between national authorities, Europol, the anti-fraud office and the prosecutor’s office. A non-paper circulated by France and Germany earlier this spring suggested either transferring competence over Union-level sanctions breaches to the prosecutor’s office or building a coordinated joint-investigation-team architecture that would route cases more systematically. The Commission has yet to commit to either option but acknowledges in its mid-cycle review that the current arrangement leaves enforcement uneven across the bloc.

Budgetary pressure is the other binding constraint. The office’s 2026 appropriation, set at just over 75 million euros, is widely regarded inside the institutions as inadequate to its expanding remit, and Kovesi herself signalled in remarks during the Bucharest event that the next multiannual financial framework will need to recognise the office as a Union-level operational body rather than treat it as another regulatory agency. Whether that recognition translates into resources will become clearer when the College of Commissioners adopts the post-2027 budget proposal in July.

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