New Zealand's new polymath talent, Dr Oliver Hartwich, the CEO of the New Zealand Initiative (successor to the NZ Business Roundtable) delights in being stereotyped as a German, then negating it.

His sustained sarcasm on the Nobel Peace Prize award to the EU shows a healthy sense of humour, piercing both the PC bias of the Norwegians who select Peace Prize winners, and the EU's world leading form in hypocrisy and pointless law writing.

Nevertheless it would have been deserved for the archtects of the Common Market, and particularly the Schengen Treaty (which largely eliminated border formalities throughout Europe) before the EECproject over-reached to become first the EC, then the EU. I thought how marvelous was their acheivement when crossing the old Franko-Prussian border on the way to Strasbourg from Frankfurt Airport a few years ago. That territory has been fought over countless times. Yet the border formalities consisted of the coach slowing from 120kmph to 100kmph.

As a constitutional lawyer I am fascinated by Oliver's casual reference to the absence of audit sign-off for the EU budget. See this from Daniel Hannan on the topic.
Apparently the default continues. It appears there is no EU Parliament mechanism to force EU functionnaires to comply with  such obligations.

One can understand born bludgers like the Greeks feeling they were just taking an accepted art to new heights when they falsified their national accounts to get past inconvenient EU requirements .