There's no Fule like an young Füle

Štefan Füle is the rather appropriately named European Commissioner for Enlargement and Neighbourhood Policy. He has just decided that Croatia should join the EU club without any serious checking of its levels of corruption. At least no long term monitoring,

Bulgaria and Romania's EU accession in January 2007 was accompanied by a monitoring mechanism designed to guide those countries' progress in the field of law enforcement, but Croatia should join without such a tool,

Sounds like a brilliant idea to me.He gpoes on with a level of sanguinity that makes me blush,

"Many lessons have been learned" from past enlargements, Füle said, adding that the focus is now on "benchmarks" for closing negotiating chapters and guaranteeing that the EU hopeful is fully prepared to join the bloc.

Asked whether "lessons learned" did not in fact mean learning from mistakes made in 2007, when Bulgaria and Romania joined the EU without having fully complied with its requirements, the commissioner replied, "no, I think that the whole enlargement was generally a success".

There were no problems in Bulgaria, none at all.

As a result of investigations into the management of EU funds in the bloc's most recent and poorest newcomer, the EU report will confirm that it has banned four Bulgarian agencies from handling EU funds because of corruption, freezing nearly 1 billion euros ($1.6 billion) in pre-accession aid and threatening future payments.

In leaked statements reprinted earlier this week, EU investigators said that, among other discrepancies, they had found that Bulgaria had misused money from EU farm aid projects worth some 32 million euros.

The EU report described a "criminal network" of more than 50 Bulgarian companies and foreign-based firms, centered on two businessmen with alleged ties to top Bulgarian politicians, the Focus news agency reported.

And naturally no issue in Romania either.

Maybe he should be called Štefan Blithering Idiot?