For more information regarding the EPPO, please visit our European Public Prosecutor’s Office – EPPO page.

Key takeaways:

• The new European Public Prosecutor’s Office (“EPPO”), created to investigate and prosecute criminal offences affecting the EU’s budget, is set to become operational towards the end of 2020 amidst high expectations.
• The budgetary and personnel resources to be made available to the EPPO, both at central and national levels, appear wholly inadequate to the scale of its jurisdiction and the complexity of the cases it was set up to target.
• The low starting number of European Delegated Prosecutors is likely explicable by complex resource allocation decisions in the various participating Member States, and will hopefully increase over time. However, the failure to ensure that the EPPO at the central level has the resources to provide material additional support to investigations at the national level threatens the effectiveness and relevance of the nascent prosecuting body.