I definitely would not rule out the occasional strategic bribe. China has a ton of interests in Brussels. Ditto the USA.

So the major, common and probably most destructive, theme is the ecosystem of specialised tender companies. I mostly know this from the software side, but if you start working on such projects, you'll quicky find out that there's a persistent ecosystem of companies which specialize for these tender signups.

People employed there optimize for winning them (at any cost - quid-pro-quo agreements aren't rare in my experience). It's common for several such companies to collude in a way that they get awarded the tenders in a circle ("I get this one, next one is for you.")

Afterwards, they outsource the work to the cheapest lowest bidder (usually IT studends in the cases I've seen for software development, but essentially they'll be bottom of the barrel juniors). The quality of such products is about the same as the quality of any outsourced product which is built only to satisfy a checklist at the end. The US equivalent of that would be a corporation getting a defense contract and then basically have everything built by the cheapest outsourcer in India or similar location. Funny enough, university labs (or spinoffs) tend to be major part of this ecosystem, using grad students as workforce - their credentials tend to give them legitimacy over smaller companies.

The results are as disastrous as you can expect - companies a HNer could expect to win usually don't (due to lack of specialized knowledge on how to game the tender process, lack of connections and cost) and those that do are really there to do the bare minimum, shed the work as much as possible and deliver something they can't get sued over.

It's also not uncommon to see whole chains of such companies - the winner sometimes shares some outsourcing work with "losers" they outsource work further, skimming the funds on top and essentially outsourcing everything to the cheapest engineer they can find.

Dealing with any public EU project has been nothing but misery for me personally (as you can imagine from this post :) and this environment bred some of the most toxic workplaces I've worked with. The products were universally terrible and rarely actually useful for the purpose.

As much as I want independent EU software ecosystem, I don't think using public funding can breed anything but more corruption.

As someone who barely interacts with the people that care about tenders, my impression is that people that usually win are the ones better at playing the game rather than better at the job. The job later is potentially repackaged in chunks and offered to other players that in turn will do the same downstream. Something like Romania gets EU fund money to build roads in Romania with a German engineering project, German contractors, German supplied materials, but Romanian workers. Or in a more particular case part of recycling trash in Germany is basically being dumped illegally in Poland for a while and the same companies keep operating and winning contracts because why not.

You create a political class full of lawyers, and you get a country where lawyers thrive, who would have thought?

Here's a short 30 pages on corruption and collusion risks in Hungary and Poland from the Yearbook of European Law, Volume 41, 2022

https://academic.oup.com/yel/article/doi/10.1093/yel/yeac009...

This is one of those things that is so obvious as to not require a source. Just sharing my perspective on this conversation, I don’t think it’s an unreasonable question to ask if you’re unfamiliar with the space

Prices aren’t the problem.

China turning off your transportation is.

How many companies do you think exist that make these types of machines?