David and Goliath battle over EU funding

The EU Culture Agency is leaving arts organisations high and dry when international project partners fail to abide by the terms of their funding agreements, according to UK theatre company, Escape Artists. The company, which entered into a three-country partnership with Milan-based theatre in prisons company, CETEC, and a French theatre company, Le Théâtre de l’Opprimé, is having to embark on legal action to protect its intellectual property, and to pursue payment from the Italian partner which received the EU funding on behalf of the project partners. The EU cash is for an arts project, ‘The Edge Festival’, tackling social inclusion issues. The project was the brainchild of Escape Artists’s Artistic Director, Matthew Taylor, and first ran in the UK back in 2000.

Taylor jointly prepared the successful funding bid for a European roll-out of the concept, and the project has been running since March this year. Although many costs have already been incurred by the UK company, CETEC, which holds the project funds, is stalling in paying the €7,000 already due, and has provided neither the funding nor the information required for Escape Artists to continue with its part of the project. CETEC is also attempting to dismiss the UK partner from future strands of the €360,000 project, without reference to the processes stipulated in the funding agreement. Taylor told AP: “We have strong reason to believe that our partners in this project had a hidden agenda from the beginning”. He has accused the Italian partners of “mismanagement”, and believes that attempts to remove them from the project may be related to the involvement of the municipal authority in the region of Lombardia, which has pledged funding of €80,000 for the project. He is also highly critical of the EU Culture Agency’s failure to investigate his accusations against CETEC, saying that this “makes a mockery of the Agency’s ambition to support cultural co-operation”. The Agency states that it “is not legally entitled to take a position in case of an argument between partners”, and has taken no steps to investigate Taylor’s claims.
Defending the Agency’s position, Marie-Luce Vissol, Programme Co-ordinator for the Agency, told AP: “each project is closely monitored by a project manager and a financial officer. Their tasks are to ensure that the project and its related activities will be implemented.” She also confirmed that the role of the Agency is “…to verify the progress of a project, to identify if there are any weaknesses and/or to provide help to the project promoters when necessary”. She explained: “if the Executive Agency is informed that there are suspicions of misuse of EU funds (or suspicion of fraud), it will thoroughly investigate the situation and take the necessary steps…” These include project audits, following which a recovery order can be launched if it is found that the project promoters are in breach of their contractual obligations. The European Anti-Fraud Office can be brought in if promoters of are seriously suspected of misusing EU funds.

But AP has seen correspondence sent to Taylor by Maria Ursoleo at the Agency, stating that there was nothing that they could do to help, and suggesting that Escape Artists should contact a lawyer. Taylor has issued a warning to arts companies in the UK who might be tempted to get involved in EU funded projects: “[They] need to be fully aware of the potential risks in doing so. We are being pushed to the point of insolvency because of the actions of CETEC and we have been stunned by the complete absence of support from the EU Cultural Agency. Our company has been working on EU-funded projects since 1996 and, sad to say, despite all the fine words coming out of Brussels, the problems of bad management and corruption just seem to be getting worse.” CETEC has been unavailable for comment.
Christoph Jankowski, European Information Manager at the UK’s official EU Contact Point, managed by Visiting Arts and sanctioned by the DCMS to support applicants to the EU cultural programmes, told AP that problems sometimes arise with partnerships of this nature, but usually before a project begins: problems of the scale and nature facing Escape Artists are rare. However, it has no authority to intervene in relation to the monitoring of funding contracts, which is the responsibility of the Executive Agency of the European Commission. Nonetheless Jankowski has been trying to support Escape Artists by attempting to communicate with relevant bodies in the European Commission and in Italy. He said: “Although European funding systems are still thought of as being shrouded in mystery, in fact they have become more transparent in recent years. Work is currently being done to ensure that the next Culture Programme, which will run from 2014 to 2020, tightens up any potential loopholes and makes the process of application and grant management even easier to navigate.”