EU-funded development org caught with €81K cash en route to conference

An employee of the Brussels-based Organisation of African, Caribbean, and Pacific States was stopped by authorities in France en route to a conference in Niger almost four years ago carrying €81,556 in cash — but despite a French court ruling in November 2020, the money is yet to be returned to the organization, which receives millions of euros each year from European taxpayers. The staffer was detained in October 2019 en route to a meeting of OACPS ministers of culture in Niamey, Niger, where OACPS said the cash was meant to pay for participants’ daily allowances, or per diems. In November 2020, a court in Lille, northern France, imposed a fine of €10,000 for failing to declare the money and ordered the cash be returned to OACPS. The organization paid the fine to French customs, but the €81,556 has yet to be recovered. It is an embarrassing saga for OACPS as it struggles to convince the European Union and its members of its added value as a legitimate channel for progress on development and geopolitical issues. A new partnership agreement with the EU for the next 20 years is still unsigned, more than three years after the end of negotiations. And earlier this year French President Emmanuel Macron appeared to hint that the EU-OACPS format was “a bit worn out.” OACPS includes around 80 African, Caribbean, and Pacific states working to implement development programs, including on climate change and agriculture. It has 56 staffers at its secretariat in Brussels, two in Geneva, and one in Malabo, Equatorial Guinea, and receives around half of its annual budget — €4.6 million of the €8.7 million total in 2021 — from European Union states. The facts of the Niamey case are described in a report, dated July 11, 2023, from an OACPS finance subcommittee to ambassadors from OACPS countries. A webpage linking to the report and dozens of other documents appeared briefly on the OACPS website this week but was taken down without explanation when Devex contacted the organization’s secretariat in Brussels. French customs declined to comment on the status of the cash, as did the Lille-based lawyer for OACPS, and the OACPS secretariat itself. The secretariat’s media, communications, and public relations expert Sousa Jamba ignored Devex’s multiple emails, calls, and text messages. “The Lawyer in France is working with the French authorities to ensure the money is refunded,” the subcommittee report states. “The Secretariat is vigorously following up with the Lawyers. The Finance Expert and the Legal Counsel are planning to travel to France to meet the Law Firm and if possible, the French authorities.” According to the subcommittee report, the French case is one of 10 legal matters OACPS is currently managing, most of which relate to employment disputes with staff affected by a recent restructure of the secretariat. A spokesperson for the European Commission emailed Devex that “the commission has no comment to make” about the missing cash. Asked whether the commission was aware of the matter prior to Devex’s inquiries, and if not, whether any action would now be taken, the commission did not reply. The legal woes come as OACPS faces a potentially existential threat from EU states’ failure to agree on a new partnership agreement between the two blocs. Negotiated by the European Commission and OACPS from September 2018 to April 2021, the so-called Post-Cotonou Agreement covers topics such as climate change, migration, and human rights and is meant to run for 20 years. However, first Hungary and now Poland have prevented EU states from signing the deal into provisional application — in both cases likely as part of an attempt to leverage concessions from the commission and EU states on unrelated topics. The effect, however, has been to sap the EU-OACPS relationship of what little political impetus it still possessed. Other recent problems include the departure of one of the OACPS’ most powerful members, South Africa; the squandering of €4 million of EU taxpayers’ money on a Brussels building renovation that never happened; and the elliptical but ominous warning from France’s Macron in February this year, when asked about the utility of the EU-OACPS partnership, that “certain frameworks are a bit worn out today.”