FINANCIAL scandal, mismanagement, fraud, nepotism, irregularities at several levels, official acknowledgment that something’s gone wrong and promises that the mess is going to be cleaned up… No, it’s not Cyprus (although it has been and will be again), it’s all happening in Brussels.
The club we’re set to join on May 1 next year is once again in the headlines for all the wrong reasons. Taxpayers’ money has gone missing by the million at Eurostat, the European Union’s data-gathering office in Luxembourg. It seems those charged with collating all the statistics which feed the EU machine are not so hot when it comes to keeping tabs on their own figures. Reports have revealed a catalogue of double accounting, secret cash reserves, inadequate controls, slush funds and collusion in handing out contracts worth tens of millions of pounds.
What went on behind the scenes bore little resemblance to what was presented on balance sheets. And that’s a story we’ve all heard before. In fact, the current EU Commissioners were selected after most of the last lot resigned in 1999 following a succession of corruption scandals in areas they controlled. Then, new Commission President Romano Prodi pledged reform, more transparency and more monitoring of how EU money was spent. To show he meant business he gave former British Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock, who had been Transport Commissioner, the job of cleaning up the mess.
Kinnock promised action and reform. He promised a root-and-branch shake-up of financial management, creating an independent auditing unit to avoid the annual embarrassment of the Commission being roasted by its own auditors for misuse of public funds.
What’s happened since? While there have been changes and streamlining, plus cutbacks in tax-free privileges and a so-called whistleblowers charter to protect those who draw attention to dodgy dealing (a charter that has since been criticised as toothless), the Eurostat scandal has made a mockery of the promises. Especially since the EU’s auditors have refused for the ninth year running to give the accounts the all-clear. One Euro MP scathingly referred to the current Commissioners as presiding over “three years of dodgy accounts” while the legacy to the EU taxpayer was “a decade of fraud”.
The very fact that the bureaucrats at Eurostat have managed to keep their criminal activities under wraps for so long has dashed any hopes that the culture under which fiddling flourishes has been destroyed. And the fact that the much vaunted pledges of effective monitoring have yet again proved inadequate only serves to further undermine credibility in the European administration.
It’s got to the point now that if the EU Commission had to apply to join the EU it could be ruled out for its conspicuous and ongoing failure to demonstrate transparency in government. Put another way, perhaps the Commission should take a leaf out of the comic book of Grouch Marx who wrote to the exclusive Friar’s Club in Hollywood saying: “Please accept my resignation. I don’t care to belong to any club that will have me as a member.”
In 1999, when Kinnock took on the Herculean task of cleaning out of the stables he said the Commission had an image problem “because a favourite bête noire of any newspaper writer is the bureaucrat”. He’s right, and for very good reason — they deserve all the scrutiny the media can muster. And that image is tarnished even more when the bureaucrat is caught with his hand in the till.
