The EU gets a prosecutor’s office of its own

MANY THINGSEU.EUEUOLAFEPPOEPPOEUVAT are simple for national governments but hard for the That includes punishing people who steal from it, since the ’s member states have mostly been wary of giving it the power to prosecute their citizens. The bloc’s main treaty requires its members to punish chicanery involving funds, and the European Commission has a detective agency—the European Anti-Fraud Office, or —to investigate. But until this year it was up to national authorities to take the culprits to court. If a country declined, there was no European body that could do so.The new European Public Prosecutors’ Office (), which was launched on June 1st, aims to fix that. The can bring criminal charges for misuse of funds and for a number of other offences, such as and customs fraud. It is headed by Laura Codruta Kovesi, a redoubtable prosecutor who from 2013 to 2018 ran Romania’s vigorous national anti-corruption agency, convicting thousands of bent officials and business people.