Romania has notched up a positive balance of around 14 billion euro with the EU since it joined the European club in 2007, according to a report from the Finance Ministry.

It has received some 24.6 billion euro from the EU budget since 2007, and has paid back some 10.2 billion euro, the report said.

Most of the EU money it received – 9 billion euro – was allotted for structural and cohesion funding, while around 5.9 billion euro was for agriculture and 5.6 billion was for rural development and fishery.

Another advantage of EU membership for Romania has been increased trade with the bloc. Today, 70 per cent of the country’s exports go to the 28-member club.

Romania is still lagging behind other Eastern European states in terms of the rate of absorption of potential EU funds. At only 25 per cent, the figure is among the lowest in the EU. The absorption rate is the percentage of potential EU money that the country obtains and spends.

Data from the European Commission shows that Bulgaria’s absorption rate of EU funds stands at 40 per cent. Other eastern European countries such as Poland and Hungary score around 60 per cent, while the rate for the Baltic states of Estonia and Lithuania is over 70 per cent.

Most of the money for Romania from EU structural and cohesion funds was intended to finance the construction of highways, however. But, according to media reports, none of these projects has been fully finished.

Furthermore, Romania is near the top of the rankings when it comes to the attempted fraudulent use of EU funds.

Last year, Romania reported 109 false claims, worth 36.6 million euro, according to the European Commission report, “Fight Against Fraud 2013”. Romania came second in the fraud stakes, though well behind Italy.

Romania joined the EU in 2007 and since then Brussels has temporarily suspended payments several times over flaws and suspected fraud in EU-funded programmes.