East European CAP racket: Euro farm fraud on vast scale

A study by The New York Times of CAP farm subsidies in central and eastern Europe has uncovered eye-watering abuse. Politicians and their powerful friends have filled their pockets with millions of euro at the expense of taxpayers and consumers and also more than half of the EU’s farmers who get less than a piffling €1,250 a year in support payments.

It’s a scandal compounded by the inability or unwillingness of the union’s commission to clean up what has been described by a former Hungarian rural development minister as an “an absolutely corrupt system”.