Almost 70% of EU's 2024 spending 'affected by material error' as staggering amount of suspected fraud uncovered

It should be noted that some €82billion (£71billion) was not audited by the EU.

Some of this funding is British taxpayers' money, while the UK pays back EU contributions nearly five years after Brexit.

The money falls into an error known as "adverse opinion," which has resulted in Mrs Von der Leyen's commission spending the extortionate sum.

The European Court of Auditors (ECA) issued the report, with its objective to outline whether errors are "material and pervasive".

Every October, the ECA publishes a report explaining its findings, which the EU commission always sugarcoats.

The ECA's headline this year reads: "Errors in EU spending persist while debt burden increases."

The EU commission painted the report in a positive light, stating: "A resilient EU budget supporting Europe's priorities in 2024."

The €250billion (£217.6billion) provided to the EU comes from collecting funds from member states, which the commission performs extremely well with.

However, how this money is spent raises question marks, with EU members demanding to know where their funding goes.

The ECA addressed the "substantial proportion of [the] expenditure [being] materially affected by error".

The ECA wrote: "This concerns expenditure subject to complex rules, mainly reimbursement-based, in which the estimated level of error is 5.2 per cent.

"Such expenditure amounted to €115.7billion (£100billion) in 2024, representing 68.9 per cent of our audit population. The effects of the errors we found are therefore both material and pervasive to the year's accepted expenditure, and we are issuing an adverse opinion on EU budget expenditure."

The ECA looks in on the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF) expenditure too, relating to post-covid recovery.

Once again, inside this report is a section known as "qualified opinion", which uncovered a staggering 19 cases of suspected fraud.

Six investigations have been launched off the back of this by the European-Anti Fraud Office, with seven of these cases reported to the European Public Prosecutor's Office, which has started investigations.

A positive aspect of Brexit is that the UK is no longer a full contributor to the EU budget; therefore, it is less affected by the shocking spending by the EU Commission.

However, due to the "divorce bill", which was signed by the UK upon leaving the EU, the taxpayer paid a staggering £33billion during the "transition period" between January 2021 and July 2023.

Theresa May and her civil servants also agreed that the UK would continue making payments to the EU in the "divorce bill" for decades to come.