The EU’s top prosecutor, who made his reputation fighting corrupt politicians in Romania, says he can’t wait to start working on those who violate sanctions against Russia, Bloomberg reports, citing Rador.

The European Public Prosecutor’s Office (EPPO), which has been in operation for just over a year, is well equipped to investigate sanctions violations. The EU wants to criminalize sanctions violations through European law and give the EPPO the power to investigate such cases as soon as possible, said Laura Codruca Kovesi.

“We are definitely ready. We can do that,” Kovesi said Friday in an online interview from her office in Luxembourg. “One of the potential sanctions-related offenses is smuggling, and we can already investigate that.” she explained, “So we could start tomorrow if we had the legal instruments.”

The EU has so far frozen €18.9 billion in assets belonging to sanctioned individuals and entities in Russia following Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in February. There is so much work in Kovesi. The EPPO is already investigating cases of fraud with the EU budget totaling more than 5 billion euros.

Kovesi was actually the first EU official to visit Ukraine since the Russian invasion and signed an agreement with Kyiv authorities to share information on fraud cases in Ukraine involving EU funds, as the country recently gained candidate status and is due to receive pre-accession funds.

“We have a fairly reliable contact with the General Prosecutor’s Office of Ukraine, and we are waiting for potential new powers of the EPPO” to work more closely with colleagues in Kyiv, Kovesi said.

Covesi has a reputation as a fearless prosecutor after leading an unprecedented anti-corruption campaign in Romania that jailed the country’s most powerful politicians.

She is now based in Luxembourg, the heart of the EU, and says she can count on the EPPO’s “broad perspective” to punish transnational crime and fight fraud, which has wreaked havoc on the EU budget.

The EPPO has already recovered €250 million in this first year, and Kovesi expects the current backlog of 1,200 cases to double next year.

Last week he announced an operation to target a €2.2 billion VAT fraud case involving 35 European countries. With some studies estimating VAT fraud in the EU at €50 billion a year, this is just the beginning, she said.

A major obstacle to all the investigations it oversees is that only 22 of the 27 EU countries are members of the EPPO, and some countries, such as Poland, refuse any form of cooperation.

“It’s a very big problem because there are connections to companies or individuals in Poland,” but when the government “says it’s not cooperating, our investigation clearly suffers,” Kovesi said.