OLAF — two mandates and a Transparency HIT

For two decades, the European Anti-Fraud Office (OLAF) has publicly branded itself as the EU’s critical line of defense against fraud and corruption. Yet, in the hard light of its own annual reports, OLAF’s transparency has not grown with the budget it guards; it has narrowed and thinned, shifting from forensic numbers to curated narratives, and finally, under Ville Itälä, to a statistical fog that blocks real democratic scrutiny.