Anti-corruption group report about the dark rooms of the EU

by N. Peter Kramer

The conclusions of TI’s EU Integrity Report are quite clear: the EU institutions are vulnerable to corruption due mainly to loopholes and poor enforcement of rules on ethics, transparency and financial control. There are no mandatory lobbying rules at the EU level and there is a trend of the EU institutions to negotiate laws behind closed doors, the so-called ‘trialogue’-meetings. These meetings bring together small teams of negotiators from each co-legislator (Commission, Council, and Parliament). TI calculated that more than 1500 trialogue-meetings were held during the last term of the EP, with no public record of them or of their content.  ‘These trialogue meetings are such an important element of the EU’s decision making process, but we don’t know when these meetings took place… or who took part in them’, TI Mark Perera said during the presentation of the report in Brussels.

TI discovered that out of the 117.000 ‘restricted’ Council documents only 13.184 are listed in the public document register with no trace of the more than 100.00 others. The report includes a separate chapter about Olaf, the EU control institution. ‘The impression from outside is that Olaf is not as it should be independent from the Commission’, Carl Dolan director of TI said, ‘Olaf held several meetings with senior Commissioners to discuss ongoing cases, without any trace of those meetings in the records…’. 

Perhaps the most embarrassing fact emerging TI’s attempt to cast light on the EU was that despite full cooperation from Commission and Council the European Parliament refused to cooperate with TI for fear of jeopardizing the EP elections presumably. This fact and the whole report show once more that the European Union is not a dream but becoming a nightmare.  The EP elections are going to show that a clear majority of the European citizens are not using their right to vote, many of them are not interested at all in the EU, many others with an opinion about the situation in ‘Brussels’  prefer to stay away from the polls