eurealist.co.uk

Anti-sense Investigation

From 2000 to 2003, the EU paid $329 million into the Palestinian budget and $194 million in other forms of assistance.

The headline is “The European Union’s anti-fraud investigation has found no evidence to back accusations that some of the hundreds of millions of dollars in EU aid to the Palestinian Authority was diverted to fund terrorist attacks or siphoned off by corrupt officials.”

Unfortunately the anti-fraud investigation also said…

“The possibility of misuse of the Palestinian Authority’s budget and other resources cannot be excluded due to the fact that the internal and external audit capacity in the Palestinian Authority is still underdeveloped”.

The anti-fraud office did advise the Palestine Authority to move away from funding families of people involved or accused of involvement in attacks on Israel.

“Some of the practices of the past, such as the payment of salaries to convicted persons or the financial aid given to families of ‘martyrs’ as well as the Fatah contributions by PA staff, are liable to be misunderstood and so to lead to allegations that the PA is supporting terrorism,”

So we have a situation that the claim is being made that to support the families of terrorists and to pay the wages of terrorists, is not in fact supporting terrorism? That although the Anti-fraud office cannot actually account for the money, they somehow can also claim “The investigation has found no conclusive evidence of support of armed attacks or unlawful activities financed by the European Commission’s contributions”, that there is at least one account in Tunis for which the PA was not yet able to clarify either the origin or the owner?

The European Anti-Fraud Office said “the Palestinian Authority has made significant progress since 2002″ to put its books in order.

The Israeli government said that, beyond the issue of abuse of EU funds, it was convinced that, under former Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, funds were used for terrorist attacks.

“In the period when Mr. Arafat ran the Palestinian Authority, there was incontrovertible evidence that in a continued and ongoing way, the Palestinian Authority channeled money to groups involved in terrorism,”

As they cannot show where the money went but admit that some of it did goes toward paying terrorists or supporting the families of terrorists, or funding terrorist groups, how on earth can they also make such a clear statement that there is no evidence? As usual the EU it turns reality on its head.