A bloke named Matt Smith, described as a historian and lawyer (although clearly not a good one since he disdains evidence) who has stood for parliament, is having a rant about what he calls financial sleaze and the abuse of taxpayers cash by Brussels on Brexit Central (HERE). He makes the oft repeated charge that the EU's accounts haven't been signed off but this is simply not true. I have had exactly the same conversation with several leave voters who all seem to have an unshakeable belief that this lie is a fact. Smith himself says:
"Leave voters knew that for over two decades the European Commission had consistently failed annual audits by the EU’s own Court of Auditors".
You only need to spend a few minutes on the European Court of Auditors website to download the audit in brief (but still 50 pages long - HERE) and read page 08 to see that Smith is not telling the truth:
"We were therefore able to give a clean opinion on the reliability of (i.e. ‘sign off’) the accounts, as we have done every year since 2007".
Richard Corbett MEP has more on this whole topic HERE.
Matt Smith particularly rails against the cost of luxury air travel for EU officials which he says was £340,929. Note that Air Force One, Trump's Boeing 747 cost 3.9 billion dollars and 200,000 dollars an hour to run. But he has no complaints about that.
To put all this into context, the Commission spends about 1% of EU GDP in total and of that just 6% is spent on administration, salaries and buildings (HERE). In other words the EU is administered at a cost of 0.06% of GDP. Not a lot is it? But Matt Smith is absolutely outraged.
The EU has about 43,000 employees, roughly three times the number at Leeds City Council (HERE) but manages a continent of 500 million.
