Britain must find £900m in additional EU payments

“We could be sent to the European Court Justice if we did not repay what
was legally and economically audited. There is a bill to pay and payment can
be enforced.”

The existing black-hole in EU budgets, between “commitments” or
contracts issued for projects and actual cash contributions from national
governments, stands at £169 billion.

In this year alone, the commission has claimed that it must settle unpaid
contracts, compared by officials to a credit card-bill, worth £8.6 billion
on top of existing national contributions after payment demands for EU
projects have spiked in Greece and Spain and Portugal in the wake of the
eurozone debt crisis.

David Lidington, the Europe minister, has rejected the commission’s claim and
insisted that an EU budget for next year, frozen in real terms at the rate
of inflation, 2.3 per cent, must be enough to cover bills.

“The commission needs to manage additional spending pressures,” he
said. “That’s a task national governments face every day and so the EU
must make the same tough decisions.”

For the first time this year, Britain has symbolically refused to sign off the
2010 EU budget in a protest at “material errors” worth £4 billion
in the Brussels accounts, the 17th failed audit in a row.

The audit found that much of the cash had been spent in “breach of public
procurement rules, ineligible or incorrect calculation of costs claimed to
EU co-financed projects”.

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