The European Parliament plenary has voted in favour of two initiatives from the European Commission (EC) that will the authorities say help protect the euro against counterfeiting and combat fraud against the EU budget. Since the euro was introduced in 2002, counterfeiting is estimated to have cost the EU at least 500 million euros. The new legislation will offer sanctions across Europe.
Every year in the EU, forged euro notes and coins are seized and illegal print shops and mints dismantled within and outside the European Union. Recent figures published by the European Commission show that a total of 175,900 fake euro coins were withdrawn from circulation last year, while according to the latest figures from the European Central Bank, 353,000 counterfeit euro banknotes were withdrawn in the second half of 2013 alone.
A new EU law will introduce common maximum penalties for the most serious counterfeiting offences: imprisonment of at least eight years for production and five years for distribution. As for cross-border investigations, investigative tools provided for in national law for organised crime or serious cases can also be used in cases of counterfeiting of currency.
The European Parliament also voted in a first reading in favour of a Directive to tackle fraud (IP/12/767), which will create a more harmonised framework for prosecuting and punishing crimes involving the EU budget.
Vice-President Viviane Reding, the EU’s Justice Commissioner and Algirdas Šemeta, Commissioner responsible for anti-fraud, said: “The new rules that Parliament just voted will strengthen confidence in our most valuable assets: the euro and our European budget. If we don’t take action to protect these two common goods, nobody else will. Both Directives agreed on today mark a strong and unified response to protecting our currency and clamping down on criminals that want to pocket EU taxpayers’ money. We would like to thank the European Parliament, especially its rapporteurs, Anthea McIntyre, Ingeborg Gräßle and Juan Fernando López Aguilar, and the Greek Presidency for their excellent work which made the adoption of these legislative texts possible.”
The EC admits there’s a variety of approaches to the protection of EU funds across states. The interpretation of what constitutes fraud to the EU budget differs from one country to another, as do the penalties. For example, the level of sanctions for fraud varies across the European Union from no mandatory sentence for fraud to 12 years imprisonment. Equally the time within which it is possible to investigate and prosecute offences varies, from one to 12 years.
The EU-wide rules endorsed by the European Parliament will introduce new common definitions of fraud. This will the EC says ensure that fraud against the EU budget is considered a crime everywhere in the EU.
