Voluntarily returning taxpayer money? Hard pass from most MEPs

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Welcome to the newsletter of Follow the Money’s EU desk, with insights from our EU specialists, news from the Brussels bubble, and the latest on our investigations!

This week: Most MEPs aren’t keen on returning unspent office expense money, despite past promises. Meanwhile, US funding cuts are shaking up Brussels’ NGO scene, and the European Court of Auditors is under pressure over shielding its former president. Plus: a cold case on airline legroom.

Story of the week

Voluntarily returning taxpayer money? Hard pass from most MEPs

Every month, MEPs receive 4,950 euros to cover office-related expenses. This “general expenditure allowance” (GEA) is a no-questions-asked lumpsum for which MEPs do not have to keep receipts. The Parliament does not check if it is misused – despite media reports suggesting it sometimes is.

But if they don’t spend it all, they can return the unspent portion. There is no obligation, though, and most MEPs either keep the leftover funds or spend everything.

Now, for the first time, we can reveal the amount that MEPs voluntarily returned to the Parliament’s coffers in the previous term (2019-2024).

Of the 253 million euros the Parliament disbursed to MEPs in those five years, just 4.3 million euros has been returned – less than 2 percent.

The number of MEPs that returned unspent GEA money varied per year, with a peak of 58 in 2019 and a low point of 18 MEPs in 2023, out of a total of over 700 MEPs.

These figures come from an overview the Parliament produced in early 2025, which was made public after our request to use EU access to document rules.

Because the figures were collected annually, we can’t say how many individual MEPs returned unspent funds – some may have done so every year. The total could be between 58 and 203.

In any case, the contrast between the 540 MEPs who said in 2017 that they wanted an obligation to return unspent money at the end of the mandate, and the 44 who voluntarily returned unspent funds in election year 2024, is striking.

There is also no breakdown by political groups – nor do the groups themselves seem to collect this data – or whether the refunds came from sitting MEPs or those who left.

But we can say, based on this data, that some MEPs in fact seem to have returned a sizable chunk. In 2023, the 18 MEPs who returned money deposited 380,000 euros in the Parliament’s bank account – an average of 21,000 euros in a single year, which is more than a third of the amount of GEA the MEPs were entitled to.

However, without more transparency, it is impossible to say whether these were extremely frugal MEPs compared to their peers, or whether the monthly sum of almost 5,000 euros is simply too much.

Peter Teffer
Journalist

News from the EU bubble

How the USAID cuts are hurting NGOs in Brussels

The Trump administration’s planned cuts to development funding won’t just impact aid programs abroad – they will also undermine democracy in Europe. NGOs and investigative journalism platforms around Europe are suddenly struggling to survive.

Two years ago, our investigative project Tracking Europe’s most influential NGOs exposed just how dependent European civil society is on US funding: our analysis of the EU’s transparency register together with the figures in their annual reports revealed that the US government was in 2021 the second-largest funder – right after the European Commission – of NGOs active in Brussels. That year alone, US-origin funds totalled 543 million euros, with at least about 10 percent coming directly from the USAID budget.

We’ve now done some new calculations and found that in 2023, these same NGOs received a total of 924 million euros from the US government – a 41 percent increase compared to 2021. Of this amount, 11 percent came from the USAID budget.

Note: this doesn’t mean all of this money was used for lobbying, it was mostly to cover their core activities on topics such as development aid.

These figures shed new light on the discussion sparked by the European People’s Party (EPP) on the desirability to get rid of funding for NGOs by the European Commission in the name of “democracy and transparency.” Because if both US and EU support would be cut, how can power in Europe be balanced by watchdogs such as NGOs?

Meanwhile, we at Follow the Money are committed to working together with investigative journalists and platforms across Europe to continue holding power to account. This is made possible thanks to our membership model. Therefore, please donate or become a member to support European investigative journalism in these challenging times.

And of course: If you have a story to tell, pitch it to us or become a source.

Lise Witteman and Salsabil Fayed

ECA pressed to justify shielding of former president from fraud probe

Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) have asked the European Court of Auditors (ECA) for a “detailed justification” for its refusal to lift the immunity of former ECA President (and current member of the court) Klaus-Heiner Lehne.

Follow the Money previously reported on the standoff between the ECA and the European Public Prosecutor’s Office (EPPO), which requested to investigate several ECA members and staff in early 2023. Lehne was accused of not effectively residing in Luxembourg, as he was required to, and of several expense abuses.

MEPs Damian Boeselager and Daniel Freund of the Greens/EFA group stressed that immunity “should not be misused to shield individuals from legitimate judicial scrutiny”. A refusal should only occur in “exceptional circumstances”, they wrote, asking the court to outline “the specific legal and procedural concerns that led to the refusal.”

Boeselager and Freund are members of the parliament’s budgetary control committee. Their amendment is part of the ECA’s discharge report – a powerful procedure that can force EU institutions to act.

Simon Van Dorpe

No country for tall men

Crammed between two seats absurdly close to each other, tall people like the author of this piece have long suffered from the cruelties of modern air travel. Won’t anyone do something to adapt seat spacing to something resembling dignity for vertically challenged humans such as ourselves?, readers might ask.

Back in 2007, the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) did, in fact, consider stepping in – as EU agencies are wont to do –to alleviate the pain and improve safety. “We are studying the possibility of changing the rules and imposing a minimum space between seats for all constructors who want to be registered in Europe,” EASA spokesperson Elisabeth Schöffmann was quoted in the Daily Telegraph at the time.

So what became of this messianic prophecy of more legroom? Was it dropped because of irate plane manufacturers? Or was it lobbied to death by budget airlines’ henchmen?

We may never know. Our cold case investigation hit a dead end when EASA told us that it had kept none of the relevant files. “You will understand that after more than 17 years, it is particularly challenging to identify documents capturing a discussion not resulting in an activity or project”, the agency replied to our freedom of information request.

Our suffering must continue, it seems.

Alexander Fanta

Our latest investigations

The EU preaches sustainable fishing – but is emptying the Indian Ocean

From tuna salad to sushi and poké bowls, Europeans can’t get enough of tuna – it’s the most consumed fish in the EU. But in the Indian Ocean, where European ships haul in tons of it, some tuna stocks are shrinking fast.

Coastal nations are sounding the alarm and demanding fairer fishing rules. But they’re hitting a wall in Brussels. The EU may preach sustainable fishing, but when it comes down to it, economic interests take priority – even far beyond its own waters.

Read the investigation here.

“To compete with Trump and Xi, Paris and Berlin must trust each other”

Trust, transparency, and new taxes – this is what European nations need to make industrial policy work, says former German economy minister and ex-MEP Sven Giegold.

In an interview with FTM, he lays out his vision for keeping Europe in the game and warns: without political courage, the gap with China and the US will only grow.

Read the interview here.

We’d love to hear your thoughts on this newsletter. Share your feedback with our team at bureaubrussel@ftm.nl and let us know what you’d like to see more of.

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