Annual Report on the Protection of EU Funds against Fraud

The European Parliament rejected the resolution on the 2024 annual report on the protection of the EU’s financial interests and the fight against fraud. 231 MEPs voted in favour, 389 against, and 33 abstained. The report was drawn up by the Committee on Budgetary Control (CONT) in response to the Commission’s 36th annual report and the 2024 annual reports of OLAF and the EPPO. As the text was not adopted, Parliament did not adopt any opinion on this annual report. Prior to the final vote, 36 separate votes were held on amendments and individual paragraphs; 28 of these were adopted, whilst 8 were rejected.

The rapporteur was Julien Sanchez (PfE). In the CONT Committee, the report was adopted by 15 votes in favour, 12 against and 1 abstention; members of the EPP, ECR and PfE, including the rapporteur, voted in favour, whilst members of the S&D, Renew, Greens/EFA and The Left voted against. In plenary, however, the PfE voted against its own rapporteur’s report: 0 in favour, 76 against, 1 abstention. The majority of the ESN also voted against (2 in favour, 19 against, 3 abstentions). The ECR was divided, with a majority in favour: 47 in favour, 8 against and 20 abstentions.

The main dispute, however, took place within the pro-European majority. The EPP voted almost unanimously in favour (164 in favour, 3 against). The S&D (5 in favour, 119 against), Renew (5 in favour, 61 against, 5 abstentions) and Greens/EFA (45 against, 1 abstention) were against. The Left also voted against (2 in favour, 41 against). Thus, from the far right, only the majority of the ECR joined the EPP.

Speaking on behalf of the EPP during the debate on 27 April 2026 was its shadow rapporteur, Tomáš Zdechovský. In his view, it “doesn’t matter at all” whether a fraudster comes from the PfE or another group; he praised the work of rapporteur Sánchez and called for a vote in favour of “a decent compromise that will lay the foundations for a new Anti-Fraud Infrastructure”.

The S&D, Renew and Greens/EFA rejected the text with similar reservations. José Cepeda (S&D) said during the debate that the report “significantly undermines the rule of law” and that “the People’s Party has fallen into the trap set by the far right in this Parliament” (translation from Spanish). Gilles Boyer (Renew) tabled a formal minority opinion on the report: in his view, the text does not sufficiently emphasise the fundamental link between the protection of the EU’s financial interests and respect for the rule of law in the Member States, and the role of civil society, independent media and investigative journalism in uncovering the misuse of public funds deserves greater recognition.

Raquel García Hermida-Van Der Walle (Renew) said during the debate that she was shocked to learn that the EPP had joined forces with the far right on this issue. Daniel Freund (Greens/EFA) described the report as the worst of the seven such reports on which he had worked in Parliament. He criticised it for failing to mention the billions which, in his view, Viktor Orbán’s Hungarian government had stolen from EU taxpayers, the dismantling of the Special Prosecutor’s Office and the National Criminal Agency in Slovakia, or the ID Group scandal.

On the same day, Parliament adopted, by 377 votes to 254, the CONT Committee’s parallel annual report on the audit of the financial activities of the European Investment Bank Group (rapporteur: Dick Erixon, ECR); this was supported by the EPP, ECR, PfE and Renew.