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EU to launch drive for anti-fraud prosecutors

26 September 2012, 11:27 CET
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(VILNIUS) - Brussels plans to launch a drive to set up a team of prosecutors empowered to deal with fraud cases across the European Union, a senior official said on Wednesday.

"The European Commission plans to put out the text of regulation for the setting up of a European public prosecutor's office next June," Giovanni Kessler, head of the EU's anti-fraud office, told AFP in an interview during a visit to Lithuania.

Kessler, an Italian magistrate who was named head of the EU's anti-fraud arm in 2010, said the move was needed to protect the 27-nation bloc's taxpayers.

"With the fragmented approach of national authorities towards a criminality which is increasingly transnational, our response is not adequate," he said.

"Everybody understands that there is a need to do something significant in this time of economic crisis. Each government owes it to their taxpayers, to their voters something significant in order to protect the reduced amount of money."

The scale of cross-border crimes such as smuggling and fraud make it hard for individual member states to beat those involved, Kessler explained.

"In order to discover and dismantle the big transnational chains of distribution of illegal cigarettes or the cartel of criminals which are behind smuggling or big economic crimes or fraud, we need a transnational approach, an integrated European approach," he insisted.

"These kinds of crimes cannot be adequately discovered, and when discovered, not properly handled only exclusively by a national perspective, as it is today," he added.

Kessler said that such an EU prosecution arm would not tread on the toes of existing national authorities, and would work with national anti-fraud offices.

"A European public prosecutor's office will be composed of central group of prosecutors coming from all the member states exclusively dedicated to these kind of crimes, plus a network of national prosecutors which will stay in the national office and will report to the central office," he said.

A majority of member states support the plan, he added.

Among the sceptics is Britain, which is traditionally wary of EU moves to pool justice powers, officials said.


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