International

Last Friday it was announced that a group of twenty-nine journalists from every member state ia to take the European Parliament to court on the grounds that it has failed to give access to the accounts of MEPs relating to spending which has been reimbursed. A splendid move: these data are, to be precise, absolutely inaccessible, despite the fact that every year I request them and despite motions I have presented to the effect that they should be available having in the past received majority support within the EP. That will teach them…

This isn’t the first weeklog that I have devoted to the lack of transparency in relation to MEPs’ expenses. See, for instance, this weeklog from more than a year ago. My request is very simple: monitor MEPs’ outgoings from their general expenses refunds and make it clear why when we travel in connection with our function as Members we don’t get back only what we spend, but rather, in addition to the usual daily allowance for every meeting day, we also receive a distance allowance.

Concerning expenditure from the monthly sum of around €4,300 intended to cover general expenses, the answer was that monitoring this would mean far too much work for the secretariat. I’m still waiting for an answer to the letter I wrote with fellow Members Gerben-Jan Gerbrandy (D66, ALDE group) and Belgian Green Bart Staes in which we asked what it would cost to conduct random checks, or checks on major items of expenditure. During a hearing, however, he answered the same question by saying that the high costs referred principally to the monitoring of all receipts, and that he hadn’t yet considered spot checks.

The action of the journalists, who include investigative reporter Hugo van der Parre, finally put the affair into sharp perspective. The European Parliament simply could not hand over the requested data, precisely because there’s no monitoring of expense payments whatsoever. These are fixed sums, and while there are vague guidelines for reimbursement of general expenditure, you can in reality spend the money on whatever you like, with no fear of anyone blowing the lid. Every year I return €30,000 to the EP, but I know of a lot of MEPs who declare that they really need this money. I ask myself why.

If the Luxembourg- based European Court of Justice rules in favour of the journalists, the secretariat will at last have to grant access to MEPs’ books, if of course they bother to maintain a financial administration. But even if they don’t win, the journalists will have for once made it clear what a shambles this is. Perhaps my proposals will then be definitively adopted at last, and we can have a normal system of monitoring of accounts when it comes to the reimbursement of general expenses, and the unaccounted double reimbursement of travel expenses will be scrapped. Long live investigative journalism!