You’ll be familiar with the ever-so-slightly desparate attempts by the movie and music industries to convince consumers that bootleg copies of films and music not only rob the industry of vitally needed funds, and provide poor audio visual quality, but also provide funds to organised crime. The ads where a man buys a cheap film from a market stall, only to find out that he’s funded balaclaved menace in his city (and got a crap video that’s unwatchable to boot) might just provide cue for comic activist Beppe Grillo, blacklisted magistrate Luigi Di Magistris, and journalist Marco Travaglio, who together this week went to Strasbourg to present an appeal to the EU parliament to stop sending EU funding to Italy.

During the week the European Court of Auditors, for the 13th year running, announced that the EU budget could not be given a clean bill of health, thanks to fraud and mismanagement that amounted to at least 4Billion Euro wasted. The news made front page news in the Euro-sceptical U.K, and provoked indignation amongst the fiscally correct Scandinavians. In Italy it seemed that only Grillo & Co. gave two hoots – and hence their trip to Strasbourg.

For decades Italian taxpayers have contributed to, and recieved funds from common EU fund for regional development. The fruits of the funding? Take a drive through Sicily, and you’ll find superb tracts of motorway that join small towns up with no apparent structural logic. Travel through impoverished regions like Calabria and you’ll find magnificently deserted Airports & Hospitals, built with EU funding and never put into operation. In the Italian case, EU funding has become a complicated route for taking taxpayers funds, placing them in the ‘gift’ of local politicians who – in a number of cases – channel the contracts involved to organised crime in return for blocks of votes.

It was a brave, if perhaps foolhardy, move for investigating magistrate Luigi De Magistris to publicly endorse Grillo’s call in Strasbourg. De Magistris, you’ll remember, is the magistrate recently removed (after he had spent four years building up a case) from the ‘Why Not’ case – a case which investigates precisely this problem – the missapropriation of EU funding in Calabria. Amongst those under investigation in the case are, apparently, current Justice Minister Clemente Mastella, and Prime Minister Romano Prodi.

Italy’s failure, despite being a member of the G8 and EU, to provide decent infrastructure and vital services to it’s southern regions is perhaps the biggest single failure of the EU’s regional development policy. And unfortunately it’s not for want of funding. Grillo’s call is, characteristically drastic and attention grabbing, but he has a point. The cutting off of EU Funding to Italy would make precious little difference to the population at large. Until the EU is in a position to impose stringent audit procedures and penalties, Italy is one country that would, perhaps, benefit from having it’s paws pulled out of the cookie jar.

Going back to our bootleg video analogy, it’s not just a poorly conceived road/hospital/airport/viaduct/irrigation system you’re buying when you hand over those EU funds. In these cases you very often really are supporting organised crime.