Almost 30% of the farming subsidy requests at the European Union level for which payments were made in 2006 contained errors, a European Court of Auditors report published on Tuesday showed. The most serious issues were found in Greece for the fifth consecutive year.

The European body shows that controls are unsatisfactory for payments amounting to almost 850 million euro in farming subsidies.

Romania is given as a bad example of spending EU subsidies for one project in which there were problems were found in a public tender.

The report revealed that most errors are found in the direct agricultural payments amounting for 28% of the total. Experts reported that all member states included in the study failed to respect the deadlines imposed by the projects. Thus, only some of the member states managed to pay all agricultural payments by June 30, 2006 - the imposed deadline.

/div>On Romania, the report mentions that procedural errors often class projects as ineligible. Thus, the Romanian agency managing the European Funds, SAPARD received the unsatisfactory classification for the errors found.

All other countries presented as showing irregularities are new EU member states such as Estonia, Cyprus and Hungary.