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Do you really believe that they could get away with 95% fraudulent spending? That nobody would notice 95 billion Euro corruption? Or to put it another way, if
by bd 18y ago
Do you really believe that they could get away with 95% fraudulent spending? That nobody would notice 95 billion Euro corruption?
Or to put it another way, if this is true, it means that they are able to run real EC functions with just 5 billion Euro budget. That would quite efficient indeed.
- gaius 18y agoNah, it just means (for example) instead of putting function X out to tender, they just gave it to a friend or a family member. The work still gets done, it just could just be done quicker/cheaper/better with more transparency. I don't believe it's literally the case that Neil Kinnock is socking away a billion Euros a year into his Swiss bank account. Interesting to note that practically his entire family are EC employees tho'.
- bd 18y agoWell, I have zero illusions about top dogs that got their positions by political means/connections. My whole point was about low ranking civil servants that do the bulk of the nitty-gritty administration work and that all must pass through a highly selective competitive exams (1 in 29 applicants [1] cf. Harvard's 1 in 14 [2]). And for these people, from my limited anecdotal evidence I got impression that they are indeed efficient, at least for bureaucracy standards. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPSO http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPSO [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard#Admissions http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard#Admissions