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Romania, most enquiries on the part of OLAF in 2017; The TelDrum case as an example
In 2017 Romania had the most enquiries in the countries of the European Union regarding the use of the EU funds -11 –out of which eight finalised with recommendations, shows the report of OLAF ( The European Anti-fraud Office) for 2017. There follows Hungary and Poland with 10 enquiries and Greece with 9.
From the 197 enquiries and 309 recommendations OLAF required the recovery of three billion euro out of which 21 million euro in the case of the company TelDrum. OLAF accuses mainly the existence of some agreements between the organisers of the bids and the beneficiaries.
Two enquiries of OLAF regarding projects financed by the European fund for regional development for the construction of roads in Romania illustrate this tendency, the report shows. Thus,the OLAF enquiries demonstrated that the representatives of a municipality in Romania who were the beneficiaries had an agreement with the representatives of the company (TelDrum) who drew up the technical project of a road, to establish the restrictive criteria in the documentation for the bid and the respective company won the contract against the other participants in the bid. To get here there were faked many documents, and the prejudice was calculated at approximately 21 million euro.The quoted source that OLAF recommended the General Directorate for regional and urban policies of the European Commission to recover the whole sum and sent to DNA judicial recommendations to initiate actions in justice. DNA started the criminal enquiry in November 2017 and Romania accepted to give the Commission the damage back.
OLAF offers as an example another case where they put an end to a fraud scheme through which EU funds were embezzled worth over 1.4 million euro, where an Italian consortium with partners in France, Romania and the UK were involved.