The European Union has granted huge subsidies for agriculture to companies owned by several billionaires between 2018 and 2021.
At least 17 billionaires were the ultimate beneficiaries of the 3.3 billion euros in agricultural aid paid by the European Union between 2018 and 2021. This happened while thousands of small farms were closed, according to official data from EU member states, as reported by The Guardian.
The list of beneficiaries includes names that were among the richest people in 2022, as published by Forbes, and some of them supported Brexit or had a favorable opinion of Vladimir Putin. Here are a few examples:
- Andrej Babiš, the former Czech prime minister who was acquitted in February of charges of agricultural subsidy fraud;
- James Dyson, the British vacuum cleaner magnate who advocated for the UK to leave the EU and whose company received payments before Brexit;
- Guangchang Guo, a Chinese investor who owns the English football club Wolverhampton Wanderers;
- Clemens Tönnies, the German meat magnate who admitted he "was wrong" about Vladimir Putin in 2022;
- Anders Holch Povlsen, a Danish nature advocate who owns land in the UK;
- Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen, a Danish businessman, former president, and CEO of the toy manufacturer Lego.
"It's madness. The vast majority of farmers are struggling to make a living," said Benoît Biteau, a French farmer and Green Member of the European Parliament.
This situation has arisen because the EU allocates one-third of its entire budget to farmers through its Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), which distributes money based on the land area owned by each farmer, not based on actual support needs.
However, due to strict confidentiality rules, permissive transparency requirements, and convoluted ownership chains of companies, it is difficult to determine who is receiving the money.
In a study commissioned in 2021 by the European Parliament's Budgetary Control Committee, researchers from the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS) found that currently "it is practically impossible" to confidently identify the largest ultimate beneficiaries of EU funding.
To obtain the best estimate, researchers cross-referenced data about agricultural subsidy beneficiaries from each member state with a commercial company database. They selected individuals who owned at least 25% of a company at each step of the ownership chain to identify the ultimate beneficiaries. The research analyzed the individual at the end of a chain of companies, said Damir Gojsic, a financial markets researcher and co-author of the CEPS report.
In some cases, however, the authors of the report were unable to trace the money as it had been transferred to regional bodies that redistributed the cash.
T.D.