Did £840m EU aid to Egypt go to waste? Money was to be used to strengthen human rights programmes No external auditors to show how money was spent in the country Hundreds of millions of pounds of EU aid to Egypt were effectively "thrown up in the air" because there is no way to prove it was effectively spent. A total of 1billion euros (£840million) was given to the African country between 2007 and 2012 to support human rights programmes. But a damning report by the European Court of Auditors said the funds were hard to track as Egypt had no external auditors, and neither did it publish figures on where the money was spent. Hundreds of Egyptians gather in front of the Virgin Mary Coptic Christian church in Cairo, Egypt, after gunmen on a motorbike shot dead three people late on October 20, 2013 Yesterday a former chief accountant for the European Commission said the report proved just how lax the Commission's controls are. Marta Andreasen, the Conservative group's budgetary spokesman, said: "Not for the first time, the Court of Auditors have shown fundamental weaknesses in how EU aid money is used. In today's case of Egypt, you might as well have thrown 1billion euros up in the air, as we have no proper way of knowing where the money was spent. Despite the often noble intentions of strengthening human rights and democracy, without a proper audit trail, we must assume that yet another huge amount of taxpayer's cash has been wasted. Egypt has been in turmoil over the past three years, after President Mubarak was overthrown in the Arab Spring. His Muslim Brotherhood successor, elected in a public vote, was overthrown by the military earlier this year. Egyptian protesters supporting ousted Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi face anti-riot police officers during the first day of the trial of Morsi, outside the police academy in Cairo, Egypt on November 4