The European Union is reporting at least €120 Billion per year lost to corruption. The real figure is potentially far higher, considering that the section on EU institutional corruption was redacted from the report. By way of comparison, the total EU budget for 2013 was £151 billion. It’s a shocking and revealing report, coming from the EU itself. But it’s no great surprise, with corruption and fraud having long been endemic in the Common Agricultural Policy, the largest recipient of EU expenditure.  Full story click here. 
As covered in The State Is Out Of Date, this situation is not a great surprise.
from chapter 3, the title chapter:
“The Common Agricultural Policy (consuming  40% of the EU budget) has been cited by regular studies as unworkable, corruption-prone, and grossly inefficient since the early 1980s. Literally billions of euros, taken from the pockets of the European populace, are scammed and lost every year as this out-of-control creation of Brussels gets on with its regular job—which itself has little merit.Yet somewhere in Brussels, nerve center of the faltering European Union, the wielders of deterministic power think that even more of our money and some clever manipulation of their ever more complex formulas will get it all working. The alternative of lost jobs (their own) and responsibilities is too awful to contemplate.”
As I upgrade this book from 1998 to 2013 it looks like perhaps the end is nigh for the European Union, an unnecessary and costly extra layer of government that never served to reduce levels of local or national government beneath it, providing little more than more pigs feeding at the metaphorical trough.

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