The Project
Since the establishment of the European Union, the protection of the EU budget and, in general, of the Union’s financial interests has been a requirement, an aim, and a challenge for the institutions and the single Member States.
It is no coincidence that Art. 325 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) mandates the Union and the Member States to combat “fraud and any other illegal activities affecting the financial interests of the Union” by means of measures “which shall act as a deterrent and be such as to afford effective protection in the Member States, and in all the Union’s institutions, bodies, offices and agencies”.
Precisely for these purposes, Art. 86 TFEU enabled the Council, using regulations by a special legislative procedure, to introduce a European Public Prosecutor’s Office (EPPO).
Thus, the primary objective of EPPO is to counter, through criminal law, any illegal conduct that harms or could harm the financial interests of the Union.
Although the provision of other legal instruments aimed at enhancing recovery and despite EPPO’s worthy efforts, in practice, there are significant difficulties in repossessing assets and funds stolen from the Union. Indeed, the measures provided for by Art. 30 of the EPPO Regulation imply that an offence has already been committed and that investigations have already been launched. Therefore, the risk is that once the EU budget is affected by unlawful acts, it will not be possible to recover what has been subtracted.
Hence the idea of equipping EPPO with more immediate tools to secure the effective prevention of dispersion of the Union’s financial assests. The object of NET4FEU is to ‘implement’ a high-tech risk alert mechanism that, by analysing operations and transactions in real-time, will promptly report to European Delegated Prosecutors (EDPs) those it deems suspicious. Thus, the EDPs could intervene at an early stage, first of all, blocking –by means of a temporary freezing order– such suspicious transactions; this would result in an actual law enforcement activity, aiming at preventing irreparable damages to the EU budget.
