Western and Central Europe

European Union (EU) member states discover and report cross-border fraud worth thousands of millions of euros every year, including the loss of at least 50 billion in Value Added Tax (VAT).[1] However, national measures to fight large-scale transnational financial crimes remain limited and unable to effectively protect the EU budget.

The consequences of the referendum on independence, held in Catalonia on October 1, 2017, have given rise to a broad debate and are still to be assessed in their entirety. In fact, the vote was just the last of a decade-long series of moves by the Catalan government and parliament, and counter-moves on the Spanish side,[1] putting the Spanish democracy and all of its branches of government under stress as never before in its recent history.