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More than £8m of taxpayers’ money has been spent on funding the public lives of former prime ministers over the last three decades, a Guardian analysis has found. All former PMs are able to claim up to £115,000 a year – until the end of their lives – in a subsidy to enable them to contribute to public life after they have left Downing Street. The annual overall cost of the subsidy has more than doubled in recent years as there are more former prime ministers than in previous eras. Three of them – Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and John Major – have claimed more than £1m in the last decade. The scheme, which is used to subsidise the private offices of ex-PMs, is coming under intense scrutiny after a leak of data from the Office of Boris Johnson. Cabinet Office rules stipulate that the former prime ministers must not use these public funds for private or commercial activities. The payments are only intended to help them to continue contributing to public life. However, the Guardian has published a series of stories based on the leaked data, which was obtained by the US non-profit Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoS), that suggest Johnson’s office has been involved in widespread commercial work. His office staff have helped vet and arrange more than 34 speeches, raising more than £5m in total, secure lucrative media contracts and work on business ventures in Venezuela, Abu Dhabi and Saudi Arabia.

Rival politicians in Greece are demanding answers over fraud accusations linked to the way €2.5 billion in EU funds was awarded to just 10 companies. Opposition parties claim the country's center-right government, led by Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, is "completely exposed" after POLITICO revealed that European and Greek authorities were investigating alleged malpractice. The inquiry is linked to public tenders for contracts using EU post-pandemic recovery fund money. POLITICO reported last week that the European Public Prosecutor’s Office (EPPO) had opened a probe, while the offices of the country’s three telecoms firms — Cosmote, Vodafone and Nova — as well as five IT companies and two consultancies were raided by the Greek competition commission. “The Greek government is completely exposed in relation to the issue of financing projects from the recovery fund,” said Syriza, the country's main opposition party. It called on the government to publish a list of companies whose projects were awarded money from the fund, known as the EU's Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF).

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In the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, the Ministry of Public Health did too little to prevent the appearance of cronyism when purchasing vaccines, the Court of Audit concluded in a report. It also said that all things considered, the then-Healht Minister Hugo de Jonge did “reasonably well.” The first Covid-19 diagnosis was made in the Netherlands at the end of February 2020. The Court of Audit investigated how the government purchased the first Covid-19 vaccines in 2020 and 2021. The Netherlands spent 1.8 billion euros on buying vaccines in those years. That excludes the costs of administering the vaccines. A month after the first Covid-19 diagnosis, the government appointed Feike Sijbesma, former CEO of DSM, as a special envoy to companies that could help combat the coronavirus - test manufacturers and the pharmaceutical companies working on vaccines. Sijbesma’s brother had a high position at vaccine developer AstraZeneca at the time. “When Sijbesma took office, the Ministry did not discuss possible conflicts of interests with him,” the Court of Audit said.