Euro-MPs keep their snouts deep in the trough

The crisis over corruption was supposed to have been lanced like a boil in 1999 when Jacques Santer and all 20 European commissioners resigned in disgrace. After this charade, our own Neil Kinnock - one of the resigned commissioners - returned to life, like Dracula, in the role of Commission vice-president. He immediately published what he called "a whistleblower’s charter", furnishing guidelines to EU staff willing to report suspicions of corruption. The boy from the valleys was set to bring the values of the Methodist chapel to the Cities of the Plain, Strasbourg and Brussels.

In the years since then, the EU’s financial record has been of a character to which only the brush of Hieronymus Bosch could do justice. Money was disbursed to support Croatia’s sugar cane industry (sugar cane can only be grown in tropical climates). Millions of pounds were sent to Paraguay, one of the most corrupt nations on the globe, and promptly pocketed by local hoodlums. When Andrew Nickson, who had been employed by the EU to help in the exercise as an expert on Paraguay, "blew the whistle", as exhorted by Kinnock, he was instantly dismissed. The Irish, too, lived up to their reputation for imparting a comic dimension to public affairs when Tanaiste Mary Harney used an aircraft funded by the Commission for fisheries surveillance to transport her to perform the opening of an off-licence store owned by a friend.

The fate of whistleblowers was uniformly dire. The man who first exposed the major corruption that forced the resignation of Santer and the other commissioners, Paul van Buitenen, had his salary halved and was moved to a lowly post within the Commission from which he eventually resigned. Marta Andreasen, who was the first professional accountant appointed to the post of budget execution director for the European Commission, was similarly treated. She was appalled to discover that the accounting system did not even run to double-entry book keeping and refused to sign off the 2001 accounts.

She was transferred to the personnel and administrative department but given no work. She claimed that her e-mails had been monitored and that she had been followed by two men in Brussels. Most instructive, however, was her account of the role played by the saintly Neil Kinnock, the man responsible for sidelining her to an administrative sinecure. "Commissioner Kinnock even tried - thankfully he did not succeed - to prevent me from appearing before key parliamentary committees on these issues," she claimed.

In a letter to her, subsequently disclosed in a British daily newspaper, Kinnock wrote: "In a letter to members of the European parliament you write that (the Commission) is promoting a financial regulation that will increase the error and/or fraud risk in prejudice of European taxpayers. Such comments are defamatory in relation to your immediate superiors." He told her she was to be disciplined. Critics claim he is dragging out the disciplinary procedure until after he demits office next October. Whatever happened to the great "whistleblower’s charter"?

That question might equally be posed by Dougal Watt, a Scottish EC auditor who was seconded to the court of auditors by the NAO. He produced a dossier, supported by 205 colleagues in a secret ballot, which claimed 15 members of the court had profited from corruption and called for their resignations. After being suspended without pay in 2002 he was sacked last year. Yet let us not lose sight of the real victim in all this. Cross-questioned by MEPs about budgetary matters in September, 2002, Kinnock the Welsh windbag gave vent to an outburst of self-pity: "The Commission is to be subject to any attack. We’re paid to be in the stocks but never to respond," he bleated after an MEP had cut short his verbal diarrhoea. As Kevin the teenager would say, "It’s not fair!"

Some EU corruption is murderous. The EU has given 134m to the Palestinian Authority, some of which is believed to have ended up in the hands of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, a terrorist group which has made hundreds of attacks on Israeli targets. The investigation into this matter was opposed by Chris Patten, EU foreign affairs commissioner. The working party that investigated the allegations produced a limp-wristed verdict, so do not hold your breath.

An issue of particular concern to the media is the treatment of investigative journalists probing the murky financial practices of the EU. On March 19 this year Belgian police raided the home and office of Hans-Martin Tillack, the correspondent in Brussels of the German weekly magazine Stern. His papers, computer and mobile telephone were seized and he was taken away for questioning and detained for 10 hours. The raid was ordered by a Belgian judge, at the request of OLAF, the EU’s anti-fraud agency. OLAF is not noted for such vigorous action - at least, not against EU fraudsters. The pretext for this action was that Tillack had had leaked to him details of OLAF’s investigation into the latest major scandal, involving the EU statistics agency, Eurostat.

It remains to be seen whether those guilty of the Eurostat fraud, in which officials illegally channelled at least 700,000 into unofficial bank accounts, will be pursued so fiercely by OLAF. The International Press Institute has protested in strong terms against the treatment of Tillack, pointing out that similar police raids on Belgian media outlets in 1995 were condemned by the European Court last year as a violation of Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights. Taken in tandem with the EU constitution, blatantly totalitarian in spirit, the threat to free speech posed by the criminal coterie in Brussels is evident.

This is the ninth successive year in which the EU’s auditors have refused to sign off its accounts. Although the worst corruption exists among officials rather than elected representatives, MEPs are deeply mired in expenses and other perks to a degree that makes them complicit. Any MEP who takes full advantage of his opportunities can quite legally earn 250,000 a year. The current allegations against Scottish MEP and European parliament vice-president David Martin convey a flavour of the prevailing culture. Like EU officials, MEPs are on financial dialysis: they need infusions of taxpayers’ money on a daily basis. If a European referendum is held, it will be time to settle accounts with the EU kleptocracy.