Malta’s poor management of European Union funds “posed a risk to international border control”, according to the EU’s auditing agency.
The European Court of Auditors yesterday published an in-depth review of the EU’s External Borders Fund for the period 2007-2013, which highlighted Malta as having experienced a “serious weakness” in the management of assets in the early years of this period.
This, it said, led to the risk that border management was not adequately strengthened where it was needed most – the southern Mediterranean.
Louis Galea, who represents Malta on the Court, presented the findings to journalists in the EU media centre in Brussels yesterday.
He said the novelty of the funds and the inexperience of the competent authorities in Malta largely explained the issues highlighted.
Malta received more than €70 million from the €1.9 billion fund in the last seven-year financing period.
By way of comparison, the Netherlands, with an immensely larger border control operation, received less than half Malta’s allocation.
In fact, only five countries received more funds than Malta with Italy and Spain both getting in excess of a quarter of a billion euros.
Malta is one of five countries that collectively received more than 55 per cent of the funds, yet it failed to include specific EU border control policies when designing management programmes, the report said.
Among the projects questioned by the European Court of Auditors was a “development” costing €540,000. The government, it noted, failed to justify costs incurred, particularly with regard to construction. The report gave no details about the project.
Malta, Spain and Poland were singled out for failing to coordinate funds they obtained from various EU sources in support of projects in hand, risking losing efficiency and effectiveness.
It was not all bad news for the island’s border control activities: the report also referred to Malta as among the best examples of asset sharing. In a case study, the report said: “Despite regularly facing migration pressure itself, Malta made one of its aircraft available for more than 90 hours [of Frontex missions].”