The Brief – 10 October 2025: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
Source: Euractiv
Locking up bad guys and making sure billions of euros of EU cash gets well spent is a tough job, and after six years at the helm of the European Public Prosecutor’s Office, or EPPO, Romania’s Laura Codruța Kövesi is set to step down next October.
As our Elisa Braun exclusively reports today, four candidates are emerging from a secretive selection process to replace Kövesi. Next up for the post coordinating a team of international fraud investigators is likely to be a German, or maybe an Austrian, Spaniard or Italian.
The job matters. The EU is hardly a leading light when it comes to countering corruption. RAND estimates that up to €990 billion in GDP terms is lost to corruption on an annual basis in the EU, while Transparency International said earlier this year that Europe was on the slide in the fight against fraud and corruption.
That makes Kövesi’s replacement all the more important, as the EPPO looks to beef up its ability to hunt fraudulent use of EU funds across all four corners of the 27 member countries.
In her six years in charge, Kövesi turned the once obscure Luxembourg-based office into one of the EU’s most visible and assertive bodies, including in Greece, where the EPPO’s investigations involve the country’s top politicians.
Often at odds with OLAF, the European Commission’s long-standing anti-fraud office, Kövesi pushed to expand the EPPO’s reach and maintain its independence. Her tenure was marked by high-profile, and still ongoing, probes into vaccine procurement, political parties, and misuse of EU funds, cementing her reputation as both feared and admired across the bloc.
From next October, Kövesi will hand over her office to one of the four candidates running to replace her. They’ll have much work still to do.
US ambassador chez nous
We hosted the freshly appointed US ambassador to the EU, Andrew Puzder, at Euractiv HQ this week for a long and candid interview on all things Trump, trade, and geopolitics.
You can watch the whole thing here or enjoy an analysis of Puzder’s comments that Brussels is surprisingly well aligned with Trump’s vision when it comes to one thing at least – tackling China.
Veggie burgers off the menu
In a week dominated by political collapse in France, and a deal that could hopefully bring relative peace to a devastated Gaza, readers have been keen to munch into our own story on efforts to strip our supermarket shelves of veggie burgers.
This is all part of a broader effort to put a stop to the labelling of vegetarian and vegan products with meat-like names – so it also applies to sausages and steak too. Amid horrific headlines, this at least offers some light, yet gastronomically significant, relief.
Death of Das Auto
A rear-guard action by Europe’s biggest car countries to reverse the EU’s 2035 clean vehicle mandate has been a long time coming. By year-end, the European Commission is planning to propose ways to roll it back and save the bloc’s carmakers from hefty fines for not shifting enough electric vehicles.
This past week, we reported on Germany’s link-up with Italy on efforts to stop the vehicle emissions law (part of the EU’s pre-pandemic green agenda), and on the fallout from Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s meeting with car bosses on Thursday. Don’t forget, the centre-right European People’s Party’s own Manfred Weber has promised to reverse the law this year.
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