Mysterious goings-on
Michael Vestey
Radio Four's File on 4 performed a useful service last week (Tuesday) by investigating the fraud and waste at the European Commission in Brussels. It also reminded us what a bureaucratic monster the Commission has become with no one seemingly willing or able to clean it up. The vice president of the Commission, Neil Kinnock, promised he would after the Commissioners resigned three years ago following accusations of fraud and incompetence but, judging by this programme, he seems to have given up as he contemplates his departure from the post in two years time.
Perhaps corruption and mismanagement is so embedded in this profoundly undemocratic and unaccountable organisation that no one can do anything, preferring to keep their heads down just to enjoy being part of the gravy train. Although Kinnock will be questioned by MEPs in September about one particular example of alleged fraud going before the European Court in Luxembourg, MEPs seem to have limited powers of scrutiny. When interviewed by File on 4 about these scandals Kinnock sounded astonishingly complacent about it all.
The presenter, Fran Abrams, pointed out that a year ago the Commission said it had lost almost £1.5 billion in fraud and mismanagement and since then will not publish new figures. Kinnock told her it was impossible to say whether the level of fraud was going up or coming down. Abrams asked him about what is known as the weighted transfer system whereby Commissioners can transfer part of their £140,000 salary to their home state and have it increased to take account of any currency fluctuation. Kinnock said he had benefited from this in the past and it was all perfectly legal, which, of course, it is.
Eurosceptics, Abrams said, would say that was all part of the gravy train to which Kinnock retorted, absurdly, 'Eurosceptics would use the purchase of a bus ticket in downtown Brussels as evidence of the gravy train.' Really? Do Commissioners ever take buses? I don't think so, somehow. Nor is it much use for those with integrity inside the Commission to take their misgivings about fraud and waste to him. The programme interviewed a Commission accounting officer who, when she was appointed, began expressing her concerns to MEPs only to be disciplined for speaking to outsiders; now her contract has been terminated. Kinflock explained that she had broken the rules. 'Some of the claims were not only without substance,' he said, 'they were potentially damaging and sensational.'
So it's hardly surprising that people think twice about drawing his attention to fraud. One employee, speaking anonymously, told Abrams about the fiddling that goes on in the money being shovelled towards the Eastern European states in advance of enlargement, but she didn't think she could take any of this to Kinnock. Wisely, if the case of Dorte Schmidt-Brown, a Danish employee of the Commission's statistics organisation Eurostat, is anything to go by. She made allegations that a London company run by a former Commission employee had won contracts under false pretences — something the company denies — but Kinnock told her the accusations were unfounded. Since then the otherwise fairly hopeless OLAF, the EU's anti-fraud body, has investigated the case and passed on dossiers to the European Court which might lead to criminal proceedings. Schmidt-Brown is now on 'sick leave'.
So inefficient are the accounting systems of the commission that a North Devon farmer was able to claim falsely hundreds of thousands of pounds in subsidies under the Common Agricultural Policy. To support a lavish lifestyle he claimed grants not only on his farm but on land belonging to other farmers, including his relatives who were appalled at the way he'd behaved. No one at the British government's Rural Payments Agency had noticed that one grid reference he gave for his land was actually out in the North Sea and that another was near Iceland. In the circumstances one almost begins to feel that he deserved to get away with it but he didn't, and he's now serving a prison sentence.
The producer of this revealing programme was David Lewis, but I suspect it's not easy investigating the internal and mysterious workings of the EU, which is probably why you rarely hear items on the radio about it. There's also the extraordinary apathy of the EU electorates towards an organisation that sucks in so much of our taxation and then wastes it, Without that apathy the EU wouldn't be able to squander the money.
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