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PRESS RELEASE

Brussels, April 7th 2025 – A damning new report from the European Court of Auditors released this afternoon has laid bare the EU's chronic failure to ensure transparency, accountability, or basic competence in how it hands billions of euros to NGOs. The report is a bureaucratic howl of embarrassment—technical in tone but devastating in content—and confirms what MCC Brussels has long suspected and has recently highlighted in our devastating new reports: the system is rigged, murky, and utterly captured by a favoured few.

The auditors' verdict? "No reliable overview of EU funding granted to NGOs." It gets worse. The Court states plainly: "Obtaining reliable information on all EU funds NGOs have received is practically impossible."

The EU-NGO propaganda complex has so far attempted to cast criticism of itself as simply the work of the "far right". But we now have direct evidence from the EU's official auditor confessing that the Union, in its self-appointed role as moral compass and global benefactor, cannot—or will not—track where its money goes, who is getting it, or what it's being used for.

Among the most astonishing revelations:

  • Opaque Data Systems: Funding data is scattered across multiple websites and databases, making any coherent overview impossible. The Court finds "fragmented" publication practices that "hamper transparency and limit insights."
  • Crony Funding: Out of over 4,400 NGOs funded between 2014 and 2023, just 30 organisations received more than €3.3 billion—over 40% of the total. The EU's much-vaunted pluralism looks more like a cartel.
  • Fictional Oversight: Despite public declarations, the Commission does not proactively check whether these NGOs uphold EU "values," there is no reliable data on what these entities do with taxpayer money.
  • Advocacy Misdirection: The report reveals that NGOs engaged in lobbying and advocacy—sometimes meeting directly with MEPs and Commission officials—had their activities whitewashed in official databases. In at least one case, there was no disclosure at all.
  • Fantasy Classifications: In the 2021–2023 period, over 90% of recipient entities were not correctly categorised in the Financial Transparency System (FTS). NGOs were mislabelled as private companies or often not labelled at all: from a sample, they found 70 entities that were not marked in the Commission's accounting system as NGOs, despite indications from the other registers that they were.
  • Delayed, Inaccurate Figures: For example, a grant agreement committed €549 million, but the FTS reported just €317 million. This is not an accounting error—it is a systemic failure.

Worse still, much of the funding remains beyond the reach of EU scrutiny altogether. Under so-called "shared management" with Member States, €2.6 billion went to roughly 7,500 NGOs between 2021 and 2023, yet there is no consolidated EU-level data on how that money was spent. The Court calls the entire structure "incomplete," "inconsistent," and "untimely."

In response to mounting reputational risk, the Commission quietly issued guidance in May 2024 to stop NGOs from being required to lobby EU institutions. That such a ban was even necessary tells its own story.

 

Frank Furedi, Executive Director of MCC Brussels, the think tank, said

"The systemic opacity revealed by the European Court of Auditors is yet another indication of how power and resources are monopolised by a few favored players, all while the general public remains kept in the dark. This report shows that the EU's supposed commitment to transparency and accountability is nothing more than a facade."

 

Sadly, the Court of Auditors' recommendations are perfunctory and lethargic: a proper definition of "NGO" might arrive by 2025. Improvements to the FTS? Perhaps by 2029. Risk-based verification of recipients' values? Not before 2028. Many of today's beneficiaries will have spent their grants and moved on by then.

This is not just a technical failure but a moral and political one. When power is this opaque, accountability becomes impossible.

 

Read more:

The full report from the European Court of Auditors is available here: 

Here is the final public version (55 pages): Special report 11/2025: Transparency of EU funding granted to NGOs

Here is the short (1 page) of facts and figures: SPECIAL REPORT 11/2025: Transparency of EU funding granted to NGOs