Katowice: The European Public Prosecutor’s Office filed an indictment at the Circuit Court here on 8 September against two suspects it accuses of trying to obtain 3.3 million euros in EU funding to open nurseries across Poland. The case is small by the standards of the office’s overall caseload. It illustrates exactly why the office exists.
Childcare subsidies sit in the awkward middle of EU spending. The sums per project are modest enough to escape close scrutiny, the eligibility paperwork is standardised, and the beneficiaries are local entities that national managing authorities rarely visit. Prosecutors describe an attempt rather than a completed drawdown, which suggests the controls caught something. It also means the recovery figure in this file will be low, because there is little to recover when money never leaves the account.
That distinction runs through the Union’s whole anti-fraud architecture. The European Anti-Fraud Office investigates administratively and issues recommendations; national authorities decide whether to follow them. Auditors found that of 615 million euros recommended for recovery between 2022 and 2024, only 23 million actually came back. The prosecutor’s office works differently. It brings criminal charges in national courts, and a conviction carries consequences a recovery order does not.
Volume is the constraint. The office is handling more than 500 investigations linked to the pandemic recovery fund alone, with estimated damage around 5 billion euros. Those files are complex, cross-border and slow. A nursery case here competes for the same delegated prosecutors and the same forensic accountants as a VAT carousel spanning six member states. Prioritisation is unavoidable, and critics inside national prosecution services argue the office spreads itself too thin by taking on smaller files it could refer back.
The counterargument is deterrence. Fraud against EU funds at the local level depends on a reasonable expectation that nobody prosecutes. Every indictment in a regional court changes that calculation for applicants in the same region, which no amount of centralised auditing achieves. Polish delegated prosecutors have been among the office’s more active, partly because Poland receives large cohesion and recovery allocations and partly because the domestic prosecution service has cooperated on evidence sharing.
What happens next belongs to the Circuit Court, not to Luxembourg. National criminal procedure governs timetables, evidence and sentencing, and appeals can run for years. The office reports outcomes in its annual review, where the gap between indictments filed and convictions secured remains the figure worth watching.
Case notices appear on the prosecutor office’s own site, and the administrative side of the system publishes its recommendations and annual reporting through the European Anti-Fraud Office. Read both, because neither alone shows whether taxpayers get their money back.
