While you were having Christmas the EU Commission agreed to pay out another €38bn of borrowed money

Graham Charles Lear
3 min readJan 2, 2024

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Britain dodges another €0.7 TRILLION EU bullet thanks to Brexit

€0.73 TRILLION has been borrowed by the EU Commission — Thank goodness for Brexit

Without Brexit, the UK would have been on the line for the massive debts being accumulated by the EU Commission. Just after Christmas (28 Dec 2023) the EU Commission announced the approval of a further €27.5bn to be paid to six EU countries. This is on top of the €10.74bn it agreed to pay out just before Christmas, as part of its €0.73 TRILLION funding package known as ‘the Recovery and Resilience Facility’.

That’s €38bn spent by the EU Commission while you were eating turkey and roast potatoes.

In a combination of grants and loans, Ursula von der Leyen’s EU Commission is spending borrowed money at huge levels — something it was never previously allowed to do under the Treaties. That all changed as a result of COVID-19 and the rules were torn up. The Treaties were overridden. Now the EU is borrowing enormous sums in the markets and it will be EU citizens who will end up footing the bill.

The latest tranches of the EU Commission’s burgeoning debt

These are only the payments made just after Christmas. The full bill is astronomical.
Payments made on 28 Dec 2023, in billions of Euros

  • Italy: € 16.50
  • Germany: € 4.00
  • Greece: € 3.64
  • Portugal: € 2.46
  • Slovakia: € 0.66
  • Slovenia: € 0.23
  • TOTAL : € 27.49 billion

The above payments follow on from payments made just before Christmas, on 22–23 Dec 2023

  • France : €10.3 billion
  • Latvia : €335.7 million
  • Austria : €42.06 million
  • Croatia : €162.5 million
  • Czech Republic: €147.09 million
  • TOTAL : €10.74 billion

[Source: EU Commission 28 Dec 2023.]

In the week over Christmas, the EU Commission agreed to extra spending of €38.2bn — all borrowed

This is €38.2bn — in one week. All of it has been borrowed and will have to be repaid.

The map below gives an idea of the extent of the EU’s funding of ‘Recovery and Resilience’ projects since 2020 — all of which have used borrowed money.

Readers may note that the Commission made payments outside of the EU to a non-member country: Turkey.

Imagine if your bank or mortgage company sent you a statement saying you owed them for your share of almost three-quarters of a TRILLION euros. (Approx 0.63 trillion pounds). You didn’t have any say in that decision of course, because it was made by unelected bureaucrats in Brussels, but you still carry the can.

Yes, we’re now out of the EU but that’s the point. If we had not left we would be on the line for these soaring debts. And yes, we know that numbers are different when it comes to governments, but this is an astronomical amount. The EU is presenting all of this as if it were generosity from Brussels. In reality, it is all borrowed and all EU countries and their citizens are liable. This is something the Commission was never allowed to do before.

Before Brexit the United Kingdom would have been on the line for all this profligacy. Thanks to the vote to leave the European Union, however, the UK has dodged another massive bullet. Yet another Brexit benefit.

Sources: EU Commission

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Graham Charles Lear
Graham Charles Lear

Written by Graham Charles Lear

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

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