The EU gets a prosecutor’s office of its own

MANY THINGS are simple for national governments but hard for the EU. That includes punishing people who steal from it, since the EU’s member states have mostly been wary of giving it the power to prosecute their citizens. The bloc’s main treaty requires its members to punish chicanery involving EU funds, and the European Commission has a detective agency—the European Anti-Fraud Office, or OLAF—to investigate. But until this year it was up to national authorities to take the culprits to court. If a country declined, there was no European body that could do so.