Budapest: For five years Hungary stayed outside the office that investigates fraud against the European budget, and for five years the Commission treated that absence as evidence of the problem. On 29 May the government notified the Commission of its intention to join the European Public Prosecutor’s Office. Brussels approved the request on 10 July. Hungarian prosecutors will now share jurisdiction over EU-funded corruption cases with a supranational body they cannot instruct.
The EPPO investigates and prosecutes offences against the Union’s financial interests: procurement fraud, subsidy fraud, corruption and cross-border VAT carousels above ten million euros. It operates through European delegated prosecutors embedded in national systems who work national files under the direction of a central office in Luxembourg. Twenty-four member states had joined before Hungary’s request. The office’s independence from national prosecution services is the point, and it is exactly why governments facing rule-of-law scrutiny had hesitated.
Accession changes the calculation on funds already frozen. Hungary lost access to substantial cohesion and recovery money under the conditionality regulation and under horizontal enabling conditions tied to judicial independence and public procurement. EPPO membership was among the remedies the Commission had repeatedly identified. Joining does not by itself release the money, and Commission officials have been careful not to suggest otherwise, but it removes one of the more concrete objections from the file.
The practical work now begins. Hungary must nominate a European prosecutor for the college, appoint delegated prosecutors, adapt its criminal procedure code so those prosecutors can exercise the powers the regulation requires, and settle how cases transfer between the national prosecution service and the new structure. Each of those steps offers room for a narrow implementation. A member state can join the office and still route cases so that delegated prosecutors see few of them, and the EPPO’s early years in other capitals produced friction over exactly that.
Leadership changes at the same moment. The Council agreed in March to appoint Andres Ritter as European chief prosecutor with effect from 1 November, succeeding Laura Kovesi, whose tenure defined the office’s confrontational relationship with reluctant governments. Ritter inherits an expanding jurisdiction, a caseload that has grown every year since the office opened, and a resourcing question the Parliament has raised in successive budget readings. Delegated prosecutors in several countries handle EPPO files alongside national dockets, which caps how many complex cross-border investigations the office can carry.
The VAT carousel work illustrates the constraint. Those cases run across four or five jurisdictions, involve shell companies that dissolve faster than mutual legal assistance requests travel, and require forensic accounting capacity the office buys case by case. The EPPO’s own reporting has put estimated damage in its open investigations in the tens of billions of euros. Recovery lags far behind.
Hungary’s arrival adds a member state with a large agricultural and cohesion envelope and a documented concentration of public contracts among a narrow set of firms. Whether the office can act on that depends less on the accession instrument than on who Budapest sends to Luxembourg and how many prosecutors it puts in the field.
