Malta ‘infla
A report released by CONCORD, the European NGO confederation for relief and development, has highlighted Malta’s inflated Official Development Assistance (ODA) statistics, stating that Malta traditionally reported high levels of refugee costs, “which usually represent around 50 per cent of its aid budget”.
The report, entitled: The 2015 CONCORD AidWatch report, ‘Looking to the future, don’t forget the past Aid beyond 2015, says that some of the expenditure items reported by EU countries as aid do not translate into a real transfer of resources to developing countries or, ultimately, to people who are poor and marginalised.
This means that some countries, including Malta, are not really providing as much support to those in need, as they are making out.
“This is the basic principle behind the CONCORD AidWatch ‘genuine aid’ methodology. Some member states, such as Ireland, Luxembourg and Poland, have excluded all or some of these items from their aid reporting. More concerning is the fact that some EU countries are misreporting some of these expenses by including costs which, under existing guidelines, should not have been counted. The reporting of noneligible migration-related expenses in Spain and Malta, or the misreporting of refugee costs in Hungary, are some examples included in this report.”
The report states that EU member states should ensure that the aid they deliver focuses on issues that matter in developing countries, by ceasing to inflate aid, and excluding inflated aid items from ODA reporting: refugee costs, imputed student costs, tied aid, interest on loans and debt relief. It also recommends putting a stop to inflating refugee costs with non-reportable expenses. “CONCORD AidWatch is also concerned that the refugee crisis could be used as an excuse to count noneligible expenditure relating to general migration flows as ODA. Refugees and migrants have a different legal status. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), migration-related expenses cannot be reported as aid, although this has not stopped countries such as Spain