After the European Court of Auditors (ECA) confirmed their suspicions in a damning report earlier this week, the Patriots for Europe (PfE) group has doubled down on its ongoing transparency campaign for the disclosure of thousands of contracts with EU-funded NGOs engaged in progressive political activism on behalf of the European Commission.
We wrote about the Court’s report in detail here. In short, the ECA established that the EU is violating its own transparency standards with its deliberately “opaque” system, where data is fragmented across incompatible online platforms, with key information mislabeled, buried, or outright missing—making reliable information on NGO funding “practically impossible” to find.
Furthermore, the court also noted that many clear-cut political lobby organizations are whitewashed as NGOs in the official records; and that much of the EU funding is concentrated in the hands of just a select few organizations, those who are most suited to advance Brussels’ progressive agenda.
To put it into perspective, €7.4 billion EU taxpayer funds were awarded to some 12,000 NGOs between 2021-2023. Around 40% of the total funding—or nearly €3 billion in this period—went to just 30 organizations, raising the suspicion of systemic corruption and cronyism.
In its press release published on Wednesday, April 9th, Brussels’ main right-wing opposition bloc argues that the evidence presented by the Luxembourg-based court makes their demands for full transparency undeniable once and for all.
Under the guise of “civil society,” what we see is, in fact, “a network of political activists” being funded almost entirely by the EU, with the sole purpose of implementing the EU Commission’s progressive ideologies through open borders, LGBT, or climate activism, the Patriots said.
We must put an end to this. We, the Patriots Group in the European Parliament, demand full disclosure of the NGO contracts. Everyone has the right to know how taxpayers’ money has been spent. It’s time for the European Commission to assert the democratic values that it constantly holds others to account for.
As we reported before, in recent weeks the Patriots have submitted 86 freedom of information requests for up to 10,000 NGO contracts that are missing or buried in the databases, but so far these have been rejected by the EU Commission—unlawfully.
On Wednesday, MEP Csaba Dömötör (Fidesz/PfE) confirmed that the group has also submitted an official complaint to the EU Ombudsman, whose office has accepted the case and will investigate.
That probe could come in handy as additional pressure, but it’s worth noting that the EU Commission is known to just ignore the Ombudsman’s rulings, especially when they pertain to transparency issues, as it happened countless times with regard to Pfizergate.
“They’re acting like they don’t understand our requests or that they are too complicated to fulfill. But we’re not asking for anything other than a list of the recipients, objectives, and values of these grants, simple as that” Dömötör told the europeanconservative.com.
“And according to our intel, these lists already exist, because certain MEPs in the budgetary control [CONT] committee have recently received them—that’s why we know how many we are talking about,” the MEP explained. “There wouldn’t be any extra work involved, they only need to be disclosed, yet they still refuse.”
| €7 billion spent on NGOs without transparency! This isn’t civil society, it’s EU-funded activism. Taxpayers deserve answers. We demand full disclosure. 
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