Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen.

It's very nice to welcome you all here to the sales on the time seminar.

I have the great honour and privilege of introducing to you my dear friend and colleague, John Spencer,

who is just a wonderful man.

He has been a stool installed to the Cambridge system for

quite a long time. And he really is responsible for inventing EU criminal law as a distinct

subject in its own right and recognising way ahead of anybody else just how important EU criminal law was.

And he has strong views, which have not always attracted the approval of some Eurosceptive,

which no doubt he will mention to you. But I hand the floor over to John Spencer and you're in for a real print.

Well thank you Catherine. It always pleased me so much to be introduced by you because you make me feel so good.

The only trouble is I don't know how I can fail to disappoint after that introduction.

Well, what is EU criminal law actually about? I'm pleased to see so many people here today because I normally think it's as much of a turnoff to Euro lawyers as it seems to be to criminal lawyers. Criminal lawyers think it's a matter for the EU lawyers, and EU lawyers

think it's a matter for the criminal lawyers, and normally nobody ever bothers to go to

seminars on it. So I'm very pleased to see anybody, let alone so many people here today.

But there's a US federal criminal justice system and a US federal criminal code and US

federal offenses, and when you talk about an EU criminal law, you start thinking about that.

But actually, that doesn't, it isn't what there is,

and what there is really at the moment is just this. A series of organisations which exist to try

to encourage cooperation, in the case of OLAF, try to ensure somebody gets investigated and

prosecuted for fraud on EU finances, though they don't do any prosecution themselves.

They merely investigate and then hand the files over to member states in the hope that they'll

prosecute.

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