The European Commission has suspended payments to the 79-member Organisation of African, Caribbean and Pacific States, or OACPS, citing management problems, “questionable” leadership decisions, and the need to recover “ineligible expenses” charged to European taxpayers.
In a letter dated Jan. 27, Koen Doens, the director-general of the commission’s development department, wrote that the preliminary results of recent audits into OACPS, initiated by the commission, left it no choice “but to suspend all payments to the Secretariat in order to protect the financial interests of the European Union.”
It could sound the death knell for the group, which was once the main interlocutor between European nations and their former colonies on topics like trade and foreign aid.