The invisible people behind 111 billion euros of EU-funded work.
The European Union pays for people, for hours worked. The Commission puts personnel costs at roughly two thirds of a research grant. Across its two flagship research programmes, that is at least 111 billion euros in staff time.
European rules require a signed record, a timesheet, for every hour. The EU agencies that pay confirmed that they never receive it. What reaches them is a total: months of work, by an organisation, on a project. Never the person. Never the full portfolio of the person.
A timesheet is checked, occasionally, one grant at a time. But no one adds a person up across their grants. Not the agency that pays, not the Commission, not the Court of Auditors. Nobody. No body.
The Union is now writing its next 2-trillion-euro budget on the same model. So I tested one sector, in Belgium: 758 organisations, their parallel grants, their employment footprint. The trail led to one line in the accounts where EU-funded work vanishes: Code 61, beside the rent and the electricity. No name, no rate, no hours. Billions in public money.
This investigation is the overview the Commission does not have on the one thing the Treaty obliges it to deliver: sound financial management.
Brussels’ transparency lobby faces the transparency test
TI-EU branded Parliament’s NGO oversight group “illegitimate”. EU Money Monitor traced €7.29bn: invisible workforce, partial audits, removed OLAF tables and the unanswered question: who gets paid?
OLAF stopped publishing two fraud tables. Belgium was first in both.
Every year, OLAF, the European Anti-Fraud Office, publishes a mandatory annual report. It goes to four EU institutions: Parliament, Council, Commission, Court of Auditors. It is supposed to show the public how OLAF is protecting their money.
Two tables were deleted from that report. Both showed Belgium at the top of fraud-related rankings. Neither removal was explained.
This is a pattern and it needs answers.
⚠ OLAF finally disclosed: 975 fraud signals about Belgium. It closed 6 cases.
For one year I asked the European Anti-Fraud Office (OLAF) to explain the 4 closed cases in Belgium in a decade, compared to Romania’s 164. Or to Congo’s 7 and Uganda’s 6.
Yesterday evening, at 17:32, OLAF gave me the answer, the missing half of that picture. The table it deleted from the annual report in 2019 and said did not exist. The data the Commission’s own Secretariat-General overruled OLAF to produce. The numbers that sat in OLAF’s Case Management System while I filed challenges, waited six months, and sent formal submissions to Parliament and to OLAF’s own oversight body.
EU’s COVID recovery fund: the Commission does not collect the data needed to verify €577 billion.
The European Court of Auditors just published its report on the €577 billion Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF), the EU’s flagship pandemic recovery fund. Of a maximum total value of €723.8 billion, €577 billion has already been committed to Member States. The audit was led by ECA Member Ivana Maletić.
What the European Court of Auditors confirmed today, in writing, about the EU’s COVID recovery fund, and what it means for the €2 trillion that comes next.
Five institutions now have to answer one simple question: if this is transparent, why can’t citizens verify it?
I sent five formal journalistic notifications to the five EU institutions whose mandates, under the Treaties, the Financial Regulation, and their own founding regulations, cover the oversight of EU grants to non-profit organisations. Each letter carries a reference number. Each letter offers seven working days for a written, attributable response. Every response received will be published in full. Every silence will be published as a silence, with the date of the letter and the date of the deadline that passed.
Europe tells whistleblowers to speak up. Then it asks them to prove what the system cannot see.
Europe’s whistleblower framework promises protection, yet when a disclosure simultaneously touches labour law, tax, social security, accounting, anti-fraud oversight, and EU grant controls, the whistleblower is often left carrying the burden of reconstructing a case that no single authority is structurally equipped to see in full.
Two years of formal complaints, nine institutions, a defamation injunction that failed, and a non-profit that kept receiving EU funds throughout all of it, left me with one single question: is this incompetence, or is it something worse?
The €21,352 to €38,976 Brussels NGO pay the public cannot see
€21.352, €32.128, or €38.976. In Brussels’ EU-funded NGO world, sums like these are billed in a single month through private companies and remain largely invisible in the public record. Amounts that far exceed an EU Commissioner’s monthly salary, structured to appear nowhere as pay.
The issue is not that public money pays people. It is that across a large part of this ecosystem, neither citizens nor EU institutions can reconstruct who actually delivered the work, across how many projects in parallel, and at what total cost. The real story is the missing workforce behind billions in EU money.
What is OLAF hiding? Two mandates and a Transparency HIT
In the 2018 annual report, OLAF still published a country-by-country table of incoming complaints from Member States (Figure 27 – page 57). Belgium: 18. Romania: 58. Spain: 32. Germany: 29. By the 2019 reporting year, that table was gone. The anti-fraud office still publishes concluded cases by country, but it stopped showing what came in. We asked OLAF for the country-level intake data for 2019–2024 and for the decision record behind its removal. OLAF refuses to answer since October 5, 2025.
Belgium received €31.2 billion in EU funding. OLAF closed four (4) cases in ten years.
Belgium received €31.1 billion in direct-management EU funding over that decade. It hosts the European Commission, the European Parliament, the Council of the EU, and OLAF itself. It is the administrative centre of the union that funds it. And across ten years of anti-fraud activity, it generated fewer concluded OLAF investigations than the Democratic Republic of Congo, which generated seven, or Uganda, which generated six.