Warsaw: Eight people are in custody after investigators tore through a competition that was supposed to bankroll Poland’s digital future and instead, prosecutors allege, bankrolled forged paperwork and padded invoices. The European Public Prosecutor’s Office, the EU body charged with chasing crimes against the Union’s budget, confirmed that its Warsaw branch led ten searches at homes and offices before detaining the suspects and informing them of charges that include subsidy fraud, corruption and abuse of office. The money at the centre of the case came from the European Regional Development Fund, channelled through a national scheme branded Fast Track – Digital Innovation. The programme was meant to reward companies turning research into marketable technology. One application stands out in the file: it secured roughly 28.9 million euro, the largest grant in the round, and according to the prosecutors it leaned on falsified documents and artificially inflated personnel costs to justify the figure. If proven, that single award would represent one of the more brazen attempts to game cohesion money in recent memory. The route the case travelled is as telling as the sums involved. It began with the regional prosecutor’s office in Warsaw, then moved to the European Public Prosecutor’s Office after a referral from the European Anti-Fraud Office, the administrative investigator known by its French acronym OLAF. That handoff is exactly the choreography the two bodies have been refining since the prosecutor’s office opened for business in 2021. OLAF gathers the administrative trail and can recommend recovery of misspent funds; the prosecutor’s office can do something OLAF cannot, which is bring people before a criminal court. The division of labour was meant to ensure, in the words of officials who designed it, that no case falls between the cracks. For years the Union relied almost entirely on national authorities to police its spending, with patchy results and little appetite in some capitals for prosecuting fraud against a distant Brussels budget. The prosecutor’s office was built precisely to remove that excuse, and its caseload has swelled accordingly, with recovery-plan money and structural funds proving especially fertile ground for abuse. The Polish case lands at a delicate moment. The Union is preparing to negotiate its next long-term budget, and every fresh fraud headline hands ammunition to net contributors who argue that money flows faster than oversight. Digital and innovation grants are particularly exposed because their value rests on intangible claims, such as software developed or expertise deployed, that are far harder to verify than a bridge or a road. None of the eight has been convicted, and the presumption of innocence applies throughout. But the operation is a pointed demonstration that the machinery built to defend the EU purse is now grinding into motion across member states, and that a grant won on paper can still unravel when investigators start checking whether the work behind it was ever real.