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EU doesn't know how much spent on curbing migrants: auditors

17 March 2016, 20:14 CET
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EU doesn't know how much spent on curbing migrants: auditors

-ECHO - Photo WFP-Rein Skullerud

(BRUSSELS) - The EU cannot say how much it spent on curbing migration on its southern and eastern peripheries or whether the aid achieved its aims, the bloc's auditors said Thursday.

The report by the European Court of Auditors covers migration aid from 2007 to 2013 but comes as EU leaders meet in Brussels to finalise a massive aid-for-cooperation deal with Turkey to curb the current unprecedented flows to Europe.

"The total amount of expenditure charged to the EU budget could not be established in the course of the audit," the watchdog said.

"Nor was it clear whether expenditure had been directed in line with the intended geographical and thematic priorities," it added.

The watchdog estimated the European Union spent 1.4 billion euros ($1.6 billion) in assistance for countries like Algeria, Georgia, Libya, Moldova, Morocco and Ukraine.

But it said that hard financial data was available only for one funding stream amounting to about 300 million euros.

In a programme for the voluntary return of migrants to their home countries, it said, the EU gave no estimate of the number of returns expected and no analysis about whether their country was ready to take them back.

"It was impossible to assess how far a project had helped to improve the existing situation," it said.

It rebuked the EU for "complex governance, insufficient coordination and the absence of a funding overview that specified who finances what between the commission and the member states."

EU external migration spending in Southern 
Mediterranean and Eastern Neighbourhood countries 
until 2014 - ECA Special Report No 9/2016

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