Is the European Parliament reformable?

The European Parliament seems to stumble from one scandal to another. Be it the misuse of allowances, for example by claiming for daily subsistence to work in Brussels only to jet off for the weekend, their second pension schemes, or their junkets to island paradises, MEPs too often make the headlines for the wrong reasons.

But the Sunday Times' investigation published yesterday, now dubbed the 'cash-for-laws' scandal, leaves three MEPs standing accused of outright corruption. The article is behind the paywall, and well worth reading in full if you get the chance, but here are the key details:

- Three MEPs, Adrian Severin, the 56-year-old former Romanian deputy prime minister, Zoran Thaler, the former Slovenian foreign minister, and Ernst Strasser, a former interior minister in Austria, were all caught agreeing to propose amendments to EU laws believing they would be paid for this work with a €100,000 (£87,300) annual salary, a consultancy fee or both.

- The meetings with undercover journalists were secretly filmed and took place in bars, restaurants and the parliament’s two buildings in Brussels and Strasbourg. Severin later emailed the reporters saying: “Just to let you know that the amendment desired by you has been tabled in due time." Then sent an invoice for €12,000 for “consulting services concerning the codification of the Directive 94/19/EC, Directive 2009/14/EC and the amendments thereto”.

- The amendments were intended to dilute directives supposed to protect customers’ deposits after scandals such as the collapse of the Icelandic banks.

The sting has already claimed the heads of two of the MEPs, with Austrian MEP Strasser resigning immediately but claiming this was to avoid "damage" to his Austrian People's Party rather than because he'd done anything wrong.

Severin and Thaler, said that they knew it was a set-up and merely wanted to see where the exchange of emails would lead and initially refused to resign but, according to the latest reports, Thaler has now also done so. Severin has quit his job as deputy chairman of the Romanian Social Democracy Party, but so far held onto his seat at the European Parliament. The Group of European Socialists in the EP has however ordered him to Brussels to explain himself.

As the Sunday Times argued in its leader, this comes at a time when:

"The European parliament and its 736 members matter more now than at any time in its 53-year history. We live in an era when much of British law and a high proportion of the regulations that control our lives are determined in Europe. MEPs have the power to amend those laws and directives in a way that affects everybody."

The EP is launching its own investigation but, if they're found guilty and perhaps even if not, this particular story is shocking enough to engrain the 'gravy train' image of MEPs in the public's mind's eye for good. Various attempts to 'reform' the EP (back in 2009 there were some harmonisation of rules on pay and a ban on hiring family members as staff) have clearly done nothing to stop the rot.

One can't help thinking that the real root of the corruption and general money-grabbing behaviour of many MEPs is the fact that the EP still thinks that it can behave like a banana republic assembly without anyone noticing.

Perhaps MEPs should forgive people for taking the view that the EP, at the end, is not a 'real' Parliament. This was the conclusion of the German Constitutional Court, which said in its ruling on the Lisbon Treaty that:

"Measured against requirements placed on democracy in states, its election does not take due account of equality, and it is not competent to take authoritative decisions on political direction in the context of the supranational balancing of interests between the states. It therefore cannot support a parliamentary government and organise itself with regard to party politics in the system of government and opposition in such a way that a decision on political direction taken by the European electorate could have a politically decisive effect. Due to this structural democratic deficit, which cannot be resolved in an association of sovereign national states (Staatenverbund), further steps of integration that go beyond the status quo may undermine neither the States’ political power of action nor the principle of conferral."

Unfortunately, with the implementation of the Lisbon Treaty in particular, the EP now has extensive powers over laws that impact on people's everyday lives.

Scandals such as these will prompt more people to suggest that it's time to move on from the argument about getting rid of just one of the EP's extra seats in Strasbourg and consider scrapping the entire thing...

Down you go...

And so ex-UKIP MEP Tom Wise has been jailed for fraudulently claiming £39,000 in allowances from the European Parliament. He used his monthly staff allowance to pay for "fine wines" and other personal expenditure.

His researcher, Lindsay Jenkins, was cleared of all charges after Wise admitted that documents he had her sign were blank at the time.

Just a thought - but does anyone out there know if any movement has been made to reclaim the £538,290 in "unduly paid" expenses that Den Dover owed the European Parliament when he was awarded a medal from the very same institution for his "vital contribution" as his term came to an end in the summer?

(This is the kind of thing that caused Chris Davies MEP to go beserk at the Lib Dem conference - see here if you haven't already)

'ello, 'ello, 'ello

The European Police College, designed to train EU member states' police officers, has had its fair share of controversy in recent years. In February, MEPs on the European Parliament's Budgetary Committee refused to sign off its accounts amid a scandal over the "private use of public funds". Apparently, almost £21,000 in EU funds was wrongly paid out for staff use of cars, transport services, mobile phones and furniture.

So who better to put in charge of such an institution than a man under suspicion for corruption himself. We wish we were joking but today's Belgian daily De Morgen reports that the Belgian police officer who will preside over the executive board of the European Policy Academy (CEPOL) during the Belgian EU Presidency in 2010 is currently a corruption suspect.

You couldn't make this stuff up.

Down the plug hole

Last week the European Commission published its annual "Fight Against Fraud" report 2008 (and annexes - see here and here).

It tells us about the "financial irregularities" in the €130bn yearly budget - in other words, the amount of taxpayers' money that has gone AWOL through either suspected fraud or loss.

It is basically accepted that a chunk of money (amounting to hundreds of millions) will go missing every year as a result of the hundreds of different people involved in executing the big EU projects such as the controversial Structural and Cohesion Funds, Agriculture Funds, and the so-called 'Pre-Accession' Funds, which go towards helping aspiring EU member states jump through EU hoops.

As usual with these types of documents, the report is long-winded and generally made to read as confusingly as possible. It's not designed to be read - especially not by journalists - as the Commission naturally doesn't want to draw too much attention to the hundreds of millions of euros lost every single year as a result of its byzantine policies.

However, it is possible to pull out some interesting snippets. In summary:

• The overall number of irregularities for expenditure has increased from 6, 047 in 2007 to 6, 595 in 2008, although the estimated financial impact of irregularites decreased from €1 024 million in 2007 to €783.2 million in 2008.
  
  
• Not all irregularities have to be reported. In Agriculture, for instance, Member States must inform the Commission of all irregularities involving an amount of over €10 000. This threshold was introduced on 1 January 2007, having been increased from €4,000. The number of reported irregularities in 2008 was a third of the number of those before 2007 - but clearly comparisons with previous years are useless.
  
  
• The report acknoweldges that "a rather large amount of subsidies is below €10,000", meaning that many, if not most irregularities have, since 1 January 2007, been going unnoticed. Raising the bar for what constitutes an 'irregularity' seems like a clever way to ignore the problem, rather than decrease the amoun of money actually going missing.
  
  
• In monetary terms, Italy reported the highest amounts affected by irregularities in the agriculture category - more than EUR 54 million, followed by Spain which reported a total amount of approximately EUR 15 million. Italy reported 1 case for the sector "fruits and vegetables" in which the total amount affected was approximately EUR 25 million.
• Italy was responsible for more than 50% of reported budget irregularities regarding agriculture.
  
  
• In terms of recovering incorrectly paid monies, in agriculture alone, €125 million was recovered during 2008 by the Member States from beneficiaries. € 32 million was declared “irrecoverable” during 2008.
  
  
• A whopping € 1.254 billion in agriculture funds remained outstanding at the end of 2008 "at the level of the beneficiaries”
  
  
• In terms of the regional funds, which are intended to help Europe's poorer regions catch up with the richer ones, the total amount affected by irregularities in 2008 was about EUR 585.2 million, EUR 528.9 million of which was from the Structural Funds and EUR 56.3 million from the Cohesion Fund.
  
  
• Apart from a decrease this year, the cost of the reported irregularities is going up, with Spain, the UK and Italy reporting the most irregularities
  

The Commission likes to pin most of the blame on the member states for the loss of money. But there's no hiding from the fact that the Commission is the chief project manager of these enormous and unweildy policies. If the money wasn't first being filtered through the EU bureaucracy, before being distributed by member state governments, wouldn't there be a far smaller margin for error? As Derk Jan Eppink, a former senior Commission official (now a Belgian MEP) told an Open Europe audience a few years ago:

"The Commission is a good lawmaker but a bad projects-manager."