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

EPPO Casebook Crosses 3,600 Cases As Damage Estimate Triples

Layla Hassan
Policy Analyst, Anti-Fraud (OLAF)

Luxembourg: The European Public Prosecutor’s Office closed 2025 with 3,602 active investigations and €67.27 billion in estimated damage to EU and national budgets, almost tripling the loss figure that sat at €24.8 billion only twelve months earlier. The expansion is not a one-off statistical artefact. It reflects a shift in the criminal map of the single market, where fraud against EU revenue has moved from the margins of national prosecution dockets to the centre of European-level enforcement.

Two figures from the report frame the structural change. VAT and customs fraud accounts for 981 ongoing cases, or 27 percent of the total file count, yet represents €45.01 billion in estimated damage — roughly 67 percent of the entire loss number. The arithmetic puts revenue fraud, not expenditure misuse, at the top of the EPPO’s threat register. For a body originally pitched as a tool to police EU subsidy abuse, the data flips the founding narrative. The union is losing far more on what does not come in than on what goes out badly.

The composition of the revenue caseload deserves close reading. The Luxembourg office identifies criminal networks composed of individuals of Chinese origin as having taken control of the entire fraud chain for goods entering the EU from China. The language used by chief prosecutor Laura Kövesi is unusually direct for an EU agency communication. The networks are described as having gone beyond mere infiltration, dominating entire activities and suffocating legitimate economic operators through unfair competition. That framing repositions VAT and customs fraud away from a tax compliance issue and toward a market integrity problem with industrial-policy implications.

Operation Calypso illustrates the scale. Carried out across 14 countries with more than one hundred coordinated searches, the action targeted fraudulent imports of textiles, footwear, e-scooters and e-bikes. Estimated revenue loss reached around €800 million, split between roughly €350 million in customs duties and €450 million in VAT. Authorities seized 2,435 containers in the port of Piraeus and arrested ten suspects, including two customs officers. The customs-officer detail is the one that should worry capitals most. It points to insider compromise at chokepoints, not opportunistic small-scale evasion.

On the spending side, the Recovery and Resilience Facility now anchors the EPPO’s expenditure caseload. By end-2025, the office handled 518 active cases related to NextGenerationEU, of which 512 stemmed directly from the RRF, with estimated damage of €5.08 billion. The fraud patterns are familiar from earlier cohesion-fund probes — misrepresentation in subsidy applications, forged invoices, inflated project costs, manipulation of tender specifications — but the report flags large green and digital transformation projects as particularly exposed. Procurement fraud tied to restrictive technical specifications or conflicts of interest favouring preselected bidders runs through several of the open files.

The institutional question is whether the EPPO’s mandate keeps pace with its casebook. Five EU member states still sit outside the office, and the report repeats earlier calls for an extended remit covering serious cross-border crime such as environmental offences. Resource constraints also surface. With personnel growth lagging case growth, the time to indictment risks lengthening at exactly the point when the threat picture demands faster action.

For policy designers in Brussels, three implications stand out. First, the Customs Reform package and the new EU Customs Authority cannot be treated as a fiscal housekeeping file. The Chinese-network finding strengthens the case for centralised data analytics at entry points and weakens any compromise that leaves national customs systems unintegrated. Second, the VAT-in-the-Digital-Age package, with phased e-invoicing and platform-economy rules, needs to be read as anti-fraud architecture, not just a tax modernisation file. Third, the procurement-fraud signal from RRF investigations should reshape how the Commission designs disbursement controls under any post-2027 cohesion or competitiveness fund.

The EPPO’s 2025 numbers will be the reference point for the next debate over the office’s powers, budget and geographic coverage. They make the case for expansion harder to dismiss as an institutional turf claim. The criminal economy targeting EU revenue has scaled. The prosecutorial response, on these figures, has not yet.

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