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Corruption across the EU bloc is costing taxpayers billions, as member states fail to tackle the problem head on, according to the European Commission. The Brussels executive on Monday (3 February) published its first ever bi-annual anti-corruption report on each of the 28 EU countries, citing public procurement and obscure political party financing as among the most pervasive problems. […] Public procurement contracts, equivalent to one-fifth of the total EU economy, are said to be the worst affected with up to a quarter of their value lost to corrupt practices. …

Two of the largest banks in northern Europe have announced they will boycott Israeli banks because they operate in “occupied territories”, the Walla! Hebrew-language news website reported on Saturday. The two banks in question are the Swedish Nordea Bank, which is the largest bank in Scandinavia, and the Norwegian Danske Bank, which is the largest bank in Denmark. […] The Walla! report comes on the same day that U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry threatened Israel that a failure in the peace talks would lead to global boycotts and delegitimization of the Jewish state. …

Germany’s constitutional court is expected to rule this spring on the legality of the European Central Bank’s bond purchases, a scheme that has eased the eurozone crisis by calming markets. Udo Di Fabio, who served as constitutional judge between 1999-2011, told an audience at the Berlin-based Stiftung fur Familienunterhmen on Wednesday (29 January) that the court is “deliberating at the moment if the ECB can buy bonds at all.” According to EU laws, the ECB is prohibited from direct government funding, meaning direct bond purchases when a national government tries to sell debt on the markets. But in the past...

Germany’s finance minister said on Monday he was open to the creation of a separate European parliament for countries using the euro, a step that could deepen divisions within the European Union. Wolfgang Schäuble’s comments, made during a visit to Brussels, challenge the very foundations of the European Union, where lawmaking for all 28 nations is by the bloc’s current parliament. Splitting that body, critics believe, would represent a dismantling of one of Europe’s biggest symbols of unity. But Schäuble said a separate parliament for the 18 countries in the eurozone would allow the smaller group to integrate more closely....

Trust in national and European institutions has hit a record-low in France, according to a recent poll, leading to a feeling of “gloom” among a growing number of citizens, and perhaps even a rise in support for the reinstatement of the death penalty, EurActiv France reports. […] Trust in others is also falling, underlining a lack of confidence in society which is symptomatic of a broader phenomenon: only 24% of the French think that others can be trusted. The French are highly skeptical of all those who are supposed to represent them, whether politicians, journalists, analysts or trade unions. […]...

Three prominent political analysts spoke with EurActiv.de on the 51st anniversary of the Elysée Treaty, evaluating the Franco-German partnership in 2014 and challenges for the years ahead. Frank Baasner, director at the Franco-German Institute in Ludwigsburg (Deutsch-Französisches Institut Ludwigsburg), said the time had come for renewed reflection, fifty-one years after the Élysée Treaty was signed. 2014 would be a historical year, Baasner said, with Germany, France and the rest of the EU putting the bloc to the test as they tackle the still unfinished eurozone crisis and military intervention in Africa. […] The assessment of prescribing a uniquely French solution...

The number of banks in the eurozone fell by almost 4 percent in 2013, according to data published Tuesday (21 January) by the European Central Bank. There were 6,790 monetary financial institutions (MFIs) based in the euro area at the start of 2014, compared with 7,059 one year ago, a 3.8 percent reduction. Crisis countries Cyprus and Greece saw the largest reductions, losing 26 percent and 17 percent of their financial sector firms over the past year. Greece now has just 62 financial institutions, while Cyprus’ sector has fallen from 409 firms when it joined the EU in 2004 to...

Germany's blowback against gold manipulation is accelerating. Following yesterday's report that Bafin took a hard line against precious metals manipulation, after its president Eike Koenig said possible manipulation of precious metals "is worse than the Libor-rigging scandal", today the response has trickled down to Germany and Europe's largest bank, Deutsche Bank, which announced that it would withdraw from the appropriately named gold and silver price "fixing", as European regulators investigate suspected manipulation of precious metals prices by banks. As a reminder, Deutsche is one of five banks involved in the twice-daily gold fix for global price setting and said it...

The “troika” of international lenders, which sets the terms of eurozone bailouts with little or no democratic oversight, should be replaced by an EU system which is accountable to the European Parliament, MEPs say. “All European instruments that are not based on EU law are provisional. EU instruments should be based on the community method, with the European Parliament acting as democratic legitimator and control body,” Austrian center-right deputy Othmar Karas told press in Strasbourg on Wednesday (15 January). Karas is drafting a report together with a French Socialist colleague, Liem Hoang-Ngoc, on the work of the troika. The name...

Britain told its European Union partners on Wednesday the EU’s treaties were “not fit for purpose” and there must be reform or it would quit the bloc. In the latest blast of euroskepticism from Conservatives in Britain’s coalition government, finance minister George Osborne said EU treaties had to be changed to protect member states like his own that don’t use the euro. The comments, made at a conference in London on reform of the 28-nation EU, are unlikely to be embraced by integrationists in Brussels, who want Britain to remain in the bloc but have become irritated by its demands...

The UK parliament should have the right to throw out EU laws, according to a letter from Conservative MPs to Prime Minister David Cameron. In the letter, made public on Sunday (12 January), 95 Conservatives (out of a total of 225) stated that the House of Commons should be able to block new EU legislation and repeal existing measures that threaten Britain’s “national interests”. A national parliament veto power would allow the UK to “recover control over our borders, to lift EU burdens on business, to regain control over energy policy and to disapply the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights”....

A campaign for the European Union to become a “United States of Europe” will be the “best weapon against the Euroskeptics”, one of Brussels’ most senior officials has said. Viviane Reding, vice president of the European Commission and the longest serving Brussels commissioner, has called for “a true political union” to be put on the agenda for EU elections this spring. “We need to build a United States of Europe with the Commission as government and two chambers—the European Parliament and a ‘Senate’ of Member States,” she said. Mrs. Reding’s vision, which is shared by many in the European institutions,...

Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier warned on Thursday that the economic crisis in Europe could still prove “dangerous” for the EU by encouraging political forces hostile to the bloc. Steinmeier also dismissed euroskeptics, who have gained political ground over the EU debt crisis, as “brainless”. “I am concerned about the situation in our union,” he told Ta Nea daily ahead of visit to Greece. “The crisis in public finances is not over yet… the economic crisis could activate centrifugal political forces that could prove dangerous to the European Union as a whole.” …

While the eurozone crisis in 2013 lingered in most countries, Germany seemed to be doing better than ever. It had low unemployment, high productivity and exports so strong that the European Commission asked it to do more to help ailing periphery countries in the single currency bloc. Chancellor Angela Merkel—the most powerful leader in Europe—was elected once again and took up a third mandate in a coalition government with the Social Democrats. […] The famous question—“Who do I call when I want to talk Europe?”—has no answer. The EU is too complicated. But 2013 showed that calling Berlin (or bugging...

EU officials are off sick three times more than the average British worker, it was revealed last night. According to official figures, European Commission officials took an average of 14.6 days off sick last year—triple the amount taken by British workers in the private sector. One in seven staff were absent from more than 20 days. In contrast, a survey by the Confederation of British Industry found British staff working in the private sector took around five sick days a year. The figures also showed European officials even outstripped Britain’s civil servants and public sector staff—who took half as many...

The irony and hypocrisy in chancellor Angela Merkel's first parliamentary speech of her third term would be astounding were it not par for the "Everything for Germany" course of action. Please consider Chancellor Urges Reforms to Preserve Euro In her first parliamentary speech since her re-election for a third term on Tuesday, she warned that Europe needed to take further action to make the euro zone crisis-proof. More European Control "I know that pushing through treaty changes in the member states can be difficult, but if you want more Europe, you have to be prepared to develop it further," Merkel...

Alvarez and Marsal, BlackRock, Oliver Wyman, Pimco: The names mean nothing to the average European, but the financial consultancies have played a central role in all the eurozone bailouts and have so far invoiced taxpayers in Cyprus, Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain over €80 million. Their “independent” expertise is used by the “troika” of international lenders—the European Central Bank (ECB), the European Commission and the International Monetary Fund (IMF)—to decide how much countries or banks need to prevent a default. They are often hired without a public tender, posing questions on transparency and accountability. […] The end result is a...

Chancellor Angela Merkel is renewing a push for European countries to make binding agreements to carry out economic reforms as she underlines continuity in her new government’s approach to the continent’s debt crisis. […] Countries currently receive non-binding annual recommendations on reform steps from the European Union’s executive Commission. Merkel is calling for binding contracts in the future though she expects only “slow progress” on the issue. …

A lost generation of jobless youth in the eurozone could tear the single currency apart if nothing is done to address chronic levels of unemployment, the World Economic Forum (WEF) has warned. “There is a growing consensus on the fact that unless we address chronic joblessness, we will see an escalation in social unrest,” said S.D. Shibulal, chief executive of Infosys, who contributed to the WEF’s Global Agenda Report. “People, particularly the youth, need to be productively employed, or we will witness rising crime rates, stagnating economies and the deterioration of our social fabric,” he added. …

Europe needs more integration, including a single finance minister for the bloc, if it is to remain competitive in the years to come—but Britain posed a major problem, former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder said. Britain would do its utmost to block any attempts to bring the 28-member European union closer together, as that would imply handing over more powers to Brussels, said the former chancellor on Thursday. … Among other moves, the 28-member European Union needed to appoint a single EU finance minister who would have the power to discipline states which failed to obey the rules, such as during the...