A former grants officer has accused a three-country treaty office of spending €4.6 million (about $5.4 million) on political ads disguised as neutral public information, a scandal that has prompted an emergency funding freeze in Brussels. Yaiza Jurado, who worked in compliance at the Atlantic Public Information Secretariat, testified on Thursday that the ads targeted candidates in Portugal, Spain and Belgium who opposed a cross-border freight and toll plan.
The office’s public accounts list €7.8 million (about $9.1 million) for the plan’s public-information programme. After Jurado came forward, its oversight council suspended new awards and opened the programme’s advertising register; the register shows 86 paid campaigns between October 2025 and September 2026, including ads that did not identify their public sponsor.
How the grants were spent
Jurado told the Cross-Border Public Accounts Committee that three contractors received the money to produce road-safety and transport explainers. She said staff were then asked to approve material that singled out local candidates as obstacles to “safe access” and “reliable deliveries”. “They bought silence with money collected in the name of public information,” she said.
The register backs up part of her account: 29 ads carried images of candidates beside warnings about blocked ambulance routes or higher food prices, while their sponsor fields were blank. The campaigns ran around local transport votes and council contests in Lisbon, Porto, Seville and Antwerp. The register does not identify who wrote or approved each ad.
They bought silence with money collected in the name of public information.
Yaiza Jurado, former compliance officer
Jurado said she objected to the campaign in a review meeting last February and was told the ads were “issue education”, not election material. She resigned in April. The register lists €1.9 million in payments to the largest contractor, but the secretariat has not yet published the names of the firms or a full breakdown of their work.
Officials face a reckoning
The secretariat’s executive secretary, Julius Rousselet, said the office had treated the contracts as public education and denied that it knowingly funded electioneering. “We will publish the review criteria and recover any money spent outside the grant rules,” he said. The freeze applies to new grants, not payments already made.
The treaty office was set up by Portugal, Spain and Belgium in 2023 to explain transport policies that cross national borders. Its grants were supposed to pay for plain-language guides and public meetings; the committee heard that the same budget line covered digital advertising, with no separate approval stage for election-sensitive material.
Committee chair Eloá Valdez said lawmakers would seek contractor names and payment records at a hearing next week. She called the freeze “a first win for voters who were never told who was speaking to them” and said the panel could recommend repayment if the ads breached the grant rules.
For Jurado, the response has brought relief after months of being dismissed inside the office. “People can finally see the campaign for what it was,” she said. The oversight council is due to decide by 6 November whether to cancel the remaining contracts and refer the spending to national audit offices in all three countries.
