Splashing the Cash The EU Way

Graham Charles Lear
4 min readOct 27, 2023

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Thanks to Brexit, the British people will no longer be paying for this beneficence.

EU Commission splashes more taxpayers’ cash around the world.

From Tanzania to Tajikistan there’s no end to the Commission’s generosity with other people’s money

On Wednesday (25 Oct 2023) EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced a series of funding rounds for countries around the world under its new ‘Global Gateway Forum’ banner. If the UK had still been a member, it would be paying for a significant portion of this.

Below I summarise the amounts of the latest funds and their destinations.

All of these new payments were announced on Wednesday by the EU Commission

TOTAL: €1.5 billion

  • Bangladesh €400 million ”for renewable Green Energy Transition”
  • Vietnam€500 million ”for the Just Energy Transition Partnership, to foster renewable energy”
  • Cabo Verde €246 million packages” in support of a greener and more sustainable future, including an energy sustainability loan, support for the Cabeólica wind farm expansion project, upgrades to the country’s port infrastructure and more accessible and affordable internet connectivity across the country”
  • Tanzania €146 million ”to the construction of the Kakono hydropower plant, contributing to both economic development and climate change adaptation”
  • The Philippines €60 million ”for the Green Economy Programme, to assist the country in transitioning towards a sustainable economy”
  • Comoros€20.4 million ”for the Green and Blue Pact ”to boost the country’s environmental and food resilience”
  • Mauritania €13.7 million ”to promote sustainable food systems and access to quality and affordable food and €10 million to promote blue economy”
  • Moldova€12 million ”to rehabilitate and modernise two key sections of railway lines” as well as ”a €16 million blending grant through EIB Global, to improve the road safety in Georgia along Georgia’s East-West highway”
  • Africa generally€46 million ”for the roll-out of the Regional Teachers’ Initiative for Africa to support the development and implementation of policies, education and professional development for teachers”
  • Armenia €10 million grant through EIB Global, ”to improve education infrastructure in Armenia through the construction of two extra-curricula education and teacher training centres in the Southern part of the country”
  • Tajikistan€30 million” to boost education”
  • Finally, ”an Annual Action Plan for 2023 and 2024 benefiting Kenya, with an education component, was signed. No amount was given.

The EU Commission did not produce a total for the payments to all these countries so I have rounded up the sum for them.

The total cost of the announcements on Wednesday is €1,510.1 billion. That’s €1.5 billion announced in one day.

As the Rt Hon David Jones, MP for Clwyd West, former Secretary of State and former Brexit Minister said

“International aid should be the preserve of national governments, answerable to national parliaments. It should not be in the hands of remote, unelected bureaucrats in Brussels.

“The UK has its own priorities for its international aid and a very cost-efficient means of delivering it. That is the way it should be, and with the huge savings we have made from our EU exit, we can continue to be one of the world’s most effective donors.”

Readers may not know of all of these countries, so here is a map

The map below gives an indication of how far-flung the beneficiary countries are.

It is important to stress the countries highlighted in red are only the ones to which the EU Commission committed funds on Wednesday, not all those globally to which the EU Commission has already been sending the money to its citizens.

Case study — Cape Verde

I picked out one of the countries on the Commission’s list: Cape Verde (Officially: Cabo Verde). This is a former Portuguese colony which originally earned its money from the Atlantic slave trade. It comprises a series of ten volcanic islands off the coast of Africa.

Today it is independent, it has a population of 483,628, and a GDP of $2.6 billion. [Source: IMF World Economic Outlook, 10 Oct 2023.]

On Wednesday the EU Commission announced funding of over a quarter of a billion dollars for Cape Verde. This is one-fifth of the country’s entire GDP. The purpose of this funding, according to the Commission, is:-

”in support of a greener and more sustainable future, including an energy sustainability loan, support for the Cabeólica wind farm expansion project, upgrades to the country’s port infrastructure and more accessible and affordable internet connectivity across the country”.

- EU Commission, 25 Oct 2023

Here is the Background to the EU’s new ‘Global Gateway Forum’

According to the EU Commission on Wednesday

“The Global Gateway Forum brings together for the first time an assembly of government representatives from the European Union and across the globe, alongside key stakeholders from the private sector, civil society, thought leaders, financial institutions, and international organisations to promote global investment in infrastructure — hard and soft — to deliver on the SDGs and sustainable growth and resilience worldwide.”

I have highlighted just some examples of the Commission’s latest beneficence. The Commission’s expenditure seems to know no geographical or financial bounds at present.

The saving grace in all this is of course Brexit.

Had the UK not voted to leave the European Union the British people would have been expected to stump up a significant proportion of these funds — and a significant proportion of many more. In this report, I have only reported on the worldwide expenditure of €1.5 billion committed to by the EU Commission on Wednesday — in one single day.

Sources: EU Commission

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Graham Charles Lear

What is life without a little controversy in it? Quite boring and sterile would be my answer.