Press Release: Criminal protection of the EU’s financial interests: Commission report reveals persistent shortcomings due to insufficient action by Member States

EU Member States had agreed in 1995 to pursue the effective and equivalent criminal-law protection of the EU’s financial interests in every Member State by means of a Convention and related protocols. But more than ten years after signature and three years after the 2004 enlargement, ratification and implementation of all the so-called PFI instruments ('Protection of Financial Interests') is not yet completed, not in the EU-15 nor in the Member States which joined the EU in 2004 or 2007. A report adopted by the European Commission takes stock of how the EU Member States fulfilled the obligations they agreed upon when signing the EU Convention on the Protection of the European Communities’ financial interests and its three Protocols.