The authorities of Gagauzia wasted a part of the €3 million in grant funding provided by the European Union on phantom projects that turned out to be useless, with about €1 million having been spent on remunerating experts and employees those accomplishments were yet unnecessary or were classified, IPN reports, quoting an investigation conducted by RISE Moldova. 

“The project Support to Local Authorities of the ATU Gagauzia  (SLPA) was implemented since 2017 until 2020, but some of its components are absent even if almost three years have passed since the deadline,” says the journalistic investigation entitled “Phantom projects in Gagauzia with EU funds”.

“Improving the quality of legislative initiatives was one of the project lines. For the purpose, they gathered a group of experts who drafted 16 bills. But none of these was adopted at the local level even after three years of the completion of the SLPA,” article author, journalist Petru Garciu commented for IPN.

According to the investigation, even if nearly three years have passed since the project was completed, not all the divisions of the executive committee of Gagauzia have been connected or use the expensive electronic document management system that was designed at a cost of almost 8 million lei (over €400,000).

“One of the goals of the project was to improve the work of the authorities of Gagauzia. For the purpose, they employed also foreign experts for whom €900 remuneration per workday was budgeted. But some of the documents that were worked out by the consultants remained on shelves to gather dust. The authorities of the autonomous unit didn’t even reduce the number of divisions of the local executive committee even if a restructuring document was also thought up as part of the project,” stated the author of the investigation.

A a part of the funds were wasted, while the other part of the grant funding went on unplanned costs.

“For example, the EU funds were used to perform European-quality renovation works in the office of the Bashkan and in other spaces of the Gagauz executive even if they hadn’t been initially planned. However, the deviation from the spending plan, including the cost of repair works, was kept secret by the authorities of Gagauz and also by the Delegation of the EU to Moldova, making reference to the confidentiality terms of the grant funding,” said Petru Garciu.

As the journalists determined, the European Union during the past eight years has been one of the largest international donors for Gagauzia, with projects to the value of over €11 million implemented in the autonomous territorial unit.

“But this fact didn’t increase the popularity of the idea of integration into the EU. For instance, a survey conducted by IData company in December 2022 showed that the percentage of inhabitants of Gagauzia who support the integration into the European Union is one of the lowest among Moldova’s region – only each third resident of the autonomous unit is for European integration,” runs the article “Phantom projects in Gagauzia with EU funds”.