Last June, 20 countries - Germany, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Estonia, Finland, France, Greece, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Portugal, Romania and the Czech Republic – reached a political agreement to create the Attorney General through “enhanced cooperation”, and the European parliament gave the go-ahead.

"Enhanced cooperation" is a mechanism where if all the EU countries cannot come to an agreement, a group of at least nine countries (more than a third) can apply a rule among themselves in specific matters and other countries can join later.

This independent European Attorney General, which was proposed by the European Commission (EC) in 2013, under the presidency of Durão Barroso, shall have investigative and penal action powers in the cases of acts that are detrimental to the EU budget, namely corruption of fraud with EU funds of cross-border VAT fraud.