Imagine a committee of 10 people granting funding to a firm to commercialise NFTs of digital fashion where the owner of the company is also a member of the committee. The company isn't even a real company but a general partnership without limited liability. Your inquiries into this affair under the public information act get stonewalled by a obscure law that where voted on as part of the budget of 2018. When members are asked about this incestuous relationship they react in an indigenous fashion saying there can not be a conflict of interest because they abstained from voting on their own project. You make some noice about this and you get ostracised. This is just one example.

A dutch sociologist has coined a term for this calling it network corruption, we had to invent a word for it because it is so prevalent, there isn't even a page about this on the English language Wikipedia: https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netwerkcorruptie

Personally I wouldn't call it corruption, at least not all of it. If you were to drill down into the individual grants, you would find a lot of things that are broadly useful but not revolutionary. There's 4M euros to produce a new additive for beeswax and 500k euros to research migratory snails and 6M euros to study some new roads and that sort of thing. There's certainly obvious corruption too, but it isn't the majority of grant money. Most stuff is just very boring and vaguely useful.

I think a more useful description: it is an ossified structure where you have to play by the rules. Much like, say, the Catholic Church. You're not going to get a grant for your startup, or become Archbishop of Salzburg, by having an idea and sending some emails. You're going to have to fully commit yourself to the institution over a period of decades, and then you're in, and you're respected, and you can do some things, as long as they're not too revolutionary. Is that good for innovation? No. But corruption? I think it's something else.

No, it's the result of the public's/politicians' pathologic risk aversion and swiftness in calling everything corruption

Since it'd be obviously bad (sarcasm) if public money were spent on projects that deliver nothing or the people receiving them used them for anything other than the narrowest interpretation of the goal then you absolutely (sarcasm^2) have to have 50 different layers of checks and plans and assessment to make sure the little money is spent on the entities that lie the best. But at least no opposition politician can complain someone bought a fancier watch than they'd like or didn't deliver enough

Anyway the EIB is a different kind of funding process than EU grants and should be more effective (even just because capital doesn't come out of the EU budget or member states directly), though how much I don't know

It's a weird kind of corruption where the most diligent and patient and boring wins