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The newly established European Public Prosecutor's Office (EPPO) took up its operational work on 1 June 2021. The Council Regulation (EU) 2017/1939 had been under negotiations from 2013 until 2017 and was eventually adopted as an instrument of enhanced cooperation. Following the entry into force of the EPPO Regulation, intense work had commenced on the EU level as well as in the participating Member States to prepare the practical set-up of operations. Since the EPPO's College was appointed in summer of 2020, it has enacted numerous College decisions, implementing the EPPO Regulation and specifying internal procedures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Directive on the Protection of the Financial Interests of the European Union ("PIF Directive") has significantly increased the powers and the tools for conducting investigations concerning financial criminality in many Member States of the European Union. This is both in terms of substantive criminal law (including the elements of the criminal offence and the penalties) and in terms of procedures extending the reach of investigative acts and their use (e.g., the seizure and freezing of assets). The Directive is also of enormous importance for the exercise of the competences by the European Public Prosecutor's Office (EPPO). Not only because of the aforementioned tools and powers but also in the light of cross border investigations, which would benefit greatly from harmonization between Member States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we will discuss the presence of procedural safeguards in the specific context of EPPO cross-border investigation between participating Member States, non-participating Member States and third countries. The various sources of the safeguards will be identified in the EPPO Regulation, other European Instruments and mutual legal assistance international conventions. We will then probe the extent of these procedural safeguards and their efficacy by reviewing the state of play of other instruments of judicial cooperation used in the area of freedom, security and justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Erwinia amylovora, the fire blight pathogen, can survive in plants and produce latent infections that can lead to false negative results in routine diagnostic procedures, since the pathogen can be present at very low numbers under the detection limit of available techniques. A protocol combining different techniques included in the EPPO diagnostic standard for E. amylovora (2013) was designed in order to determine the minimum amount of plants necessary for detecting the pathogen in asymptomatic plant material. To this aim, single samples of flowers and shoots from pear, apple, and loquat were spiked with an E. amylovora strain at different concentrations, and then analyzed by isolation, real-time PCR and ELISA-DASI. Thereafter, using the single spiked samples that were positive for any of the techniques used, composite spiked samples were prepared by adding to single spiked samples increasing amounts of plant material. Interestingly, whole results show that the most robust technique, less affected by the amount of plant material, was the real-time PCR after enrichment, since 10¹-10² cfu ml-1 of E. amylovora could be detected in most cases, both in flowers and in shoots, regardless of the amount of simulated plants analyzed, 3, 5, 10 or 20. The enrichment was confirmed as a necessary step in the analysis of bulked samples to achieve a greater sensitivity. This study is a relevant contribution for programs of extensive screening surveys for prevention of fire blight disease, since it shows that samples can be processed as a pool, improving the detection of E. amylovora in asymptomatic samples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Debate about a European Public Prosecutor's Office still lacks a sound evidential basis. Reliable information about (1) the extent of fraud against the EU's financial interests, and (2) the extent of cross-border elements in fraud against those interests, is not readily available. Given this evidence gap, attention should focus on improving data collection and capturing casework experience. Eurojust has an important role to play in this process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]