ABSTRACT
One May morning in 1989 investigators from the EU Court of Auditors were amazed by the apparently crazy activities of dockworkers in the bustling port of Hamburg. With conveyors at both ends of the hold of the freighter Kapitan Danilkin, they were loading wheat out of the ship at one end-and back in again at the other. The wheat, from France, was being unloaded for a brief touchdown on German soil before being reloaded for export to Russia. But there was nothing crazy about the reward for this activity: an extra export subsidy bonus from the Brussels farm fund of around $17 a tonne-in addition to the normal subsidy for exporting surplus EU wheat to countries outside the Union which was then $98 a tonne.
