As the Guardian notes this morning:

Hundreds of millions of pounds of European Union aid to help the poor in Africa is being handed over without public scrutiny to banks and private equity companies and funnelled into tax havens, a new report claims.

Counter Balance, a group of non-government organisations, has investigated the €1.1bn (£932m) of annual aid from the taxpayer-funded European Investment Bank to Africa and the Caribbean. It alleges that the cash disappeared into African banks, a Luxembourg tax haven and a Nigerian bank whose managing director was under investigation for fraud.

Nothing about this surprises me: it’s just another example of state cash flows being captured for the private benefit of elites — the standard business model emerging throughout the world economy right now as our major multinational corporations fail to generate any new wealth of any significance.

The report is available here.