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The European Court of Auditors dropped another uncomfortable report this week, and Romania once again finds itself on the list of countries that cannot fully account for how billions in post-COVID recovery money were spent. Released on May 6, the audit covered ten member states: Austria, Bulgaria, Estonia, France, Germany, Latvia, Malta, the Netherlands, Romania and Spain. And the auditors did not mince words. Transparency, they said, was insufficient. Traceability, patchy. And the public, frankly, has no clear picture of who ended up with the money.
The fund in question is the Recovery and Resilience Facility, the EU’s flagship answer to the economic damage caused by the pandemic. By the end of January 2026, the European Commission had committed €577 billion of the facility’s total €723.8 billion envelope to all 27 member states. Romania has been one of the major beneficiaries. The auditors found that while money can technically be traced from source to recipient in most cases, the supporting data is often incomplete, scattered, or only handed over after months of requests. In several countries, including Romania, actual costs of finished projects came in lower than the original estimates, raising the awkward question of whether some governments received more money than they actually needed.
Ivana Maletic, the auditor who led the review, put it plainly: citizens have a right to know who got the money and how much was actually spent. The report warns that these transparency gaps cannot be allowed to bleed into the EU’s next seven-year budget, which will follow a similar funding model.
Back in April 2023, Romanian media published a preliminary European Commission audit report that was, by any measure, damning. The document examined how Romanian authorities had used Emergency Ordinance 11/2020, a piece of legislation that allowed public bodies to skip standard tender procedures during the state of emergency. The auditors concluded the ordinance had been used to excess. A 25% financial correction was recommended on COVID-era purchases, and 31% on the broader sample of tenders examined. In plain language: a quarter of those EU-funded contracts could not be properly justified, and Romanian taxpayers would have to absorb the loss.
The contracts cited in that audit were not small. Most of them ran into tens of millions of euros. The General Inspectorate for Emergency Situations (IGSU) appeared repeatedly. So did suppliers like Mediclin and Siramed, along with PCR test contracts. In one case, a single bidder won a procurement worth more than €11,000 for medical coveralls because the technical requirements had been written so narrowly that eight of the nine bidders were excluded. The winning supplier then delivered roughly 100,000 units out of the 750,000 contracted.
Where was the DNA, the National Anticorruption Directorate, while all this was unfolding? The DNA, in fairness, did open files. As far back as May 2020, then-chief prosecutor Crin Bologa announced that 33 criminal cases had been opened concerning public procurement during the state of emergency. The cases covered protective equipment, masks that were later declared non-compliant by EU authorities, and the now-infamous Unifarm contracts. Unifarm, the state pharmaceutical company, had become one of the central spending vehicles in the health system once the pandemic hit. 2.2 million masks bought through intermediaries at double the market price, some delivered by the wife of a former intelligence officer; isolation pods bought for €17,000 each, with later attempts to sell them on to the Health Ministry at 80,000 lei a piece, roughly the price of a car. Bologa, asked about the value of the prejudice, did not give a precise number but said the complaints involved “hundreds of millions of lei and millions of euros.”
Then there was the vaccine criminal file, which dwarfed everything else. In December 2023, the DNA placed former Health Minister Vlad Voiculescu under criminal investigation for abuse of office in a case involving the procurement of more than 50 million COVID vaccine doses, with a total value cited at around €10 billion. Prosecutors alleged that on March 10 and 18, 2021, Voiculescu had ordered the purchase of an additional 14.4 million doses despite knowing that Romania had communicated to the European Commission an eligible vaccination population of only 10.7 million, and that the doses already contracted before January 2021 (over 37.5 million) would have covered more than 23 million people. Former Prime Minister Florin Cîțu and former Health Minister Ioana Mihăilă were also drawn into the case.
Years on, with the auditors still writing and the prosecutors still working, Romanians still do not have a full account of where the money went, and very few people have been held meaningfully responsible. The European Court of Auditors is now politely demanding that this not happen again with the next EU budget.