The Director of the European Regions Research and Innovation Network (ERRIN) Claus Schultz has stated in the Euractiv blog that EU funds were ending up in the hands of the Bulgarian mafia.

Schultz points out that Bulgaria's issues with respect to the absorption of EU money included corrupt or incompetent political and administrative officials.

The ERRIN Director, however, uses the Bulgarian case to discuss what he believes was an all-European problem. In his view, the absorption of EU funds encouraged organized crime groups to intensify their "white-collar crimes".

The distribution of EU money also provided for corruption among the administration, whose members sought to take advantage of the whole situation by supporting economically unjustified projects.

According to Schultz, these issues necessitated a redesign of the whole scheme for distributing EU funds in order to replace the present approach that he described as "slow and incremental".

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